The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (25 page)

The fundamental attribution error refers to the human tendency to interpret the cause of other people's behavior in terms of dispositional traits. For example, ability, personality, sex, and race are enduring characteristics of the other person, and these would seem to be a plausible explanation for the person's behavior. It is an attribution error, however, because it fails to take into account how factors external to other people can have a major impact on their behavior. These situational factors are temporary rather than permanent, and consequently it is quite possible that the person's behavior will change in the future if his or her situation changes. This error of interpretation is pervasive, so much so that it is regarded as perhaps the fundamental principle of social psychology. Consider it yourself:

Are you shy or outgoing, or does your behavior depend on the situation? Are you calm or intense, quiet or talkative, lenient or firm? Or, again, does your behavior depend on the situation? Now think of a friend, and answer the same questions about his or her behavior. Do you notice a difference? Chances are you do. Research shows that people are more likely to say “It depends on the situation” to describe themselves than to describe others.
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If it is correct that the left-hemisphere interpreter is responsible for the fundamental attribution error, then it ought to be a universal characteristic of human beings, rooted in brain structure since the origin of modern human beings. Cultural differences should not alter the likelihood of making the error. This question has been of interest in social and cultural psychology because it is known that in collectivist cultures the self is defined largely by relationships to other members of one's reference groups. Collectivist cultures see the self as part of a group more so than do individualistic cultures. If one lacked an independent view of the self, then there may be less of a tendency to assume that the behavior of another person corresponds to his or her personality. The dispositional error of downplaying the role of temporary, varying situational explanations for behavior may be less likely for those who belong to a collectivist culture. Indeed, there is some support for this hypothesis: “Perceivers from individualistic cultures (e.g., Australia, Great Britain, United States) tend to favor dispositional explanations for behavior, whereas perceivers in collectivist cultures (e.g., China, India, Taiwan) tend to prefer situational explanations.”
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However, asking people to compare a dispositional explanation (e.g., he said little at the meeting because he is shy) with a situational explanation (e.g., he said little at the meeting because he had a headache) is one thing; perhaps cultural differences in fact lead one to
prefer
one kind of explanation over another, depending on the stress placed on individualism and the independence of the self from the group. But it may still be the case that all human beings, regardless of their cultural identity, still actually make the dispositional attribution. A comparison of American and Chinese participants found that both individualists and collectivists in fact are equally likely to make the fundamental attribution error.
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After reading an essay in favor of
capital punishment, both ethnic groups assumed that the author's true attitude corresponded to the position advocated in the essay, even though they had been warned that the essayist was assigned a position to defend. In line with the view advocated here, the left-hemisphere interpreter is responsible for the fundamental attribution error, and the fundamental attribution error is truly fundamental to the modern mental ensemble of our species without respect to culture.

A fundamental attribution error with immense historical consequences was the one made by Adolph Hitler. His hatred of the Jewish people was driven by an attribution of biological inferiority. In his imagination, his
Volk
—the in-group—was a superior strain of humanity—the Aryan race. The Aryans, according to Hitler's demagoguery, were destined to rule Europe and the world, at the expense of the non-Aryan Poles and Jews. Hitler was not alone in his belief that people could be and should be ranked. It was a standard belief of Western science, pervasive throughout Europe and the United States. Herbert Spencer's concept of the survival of the fittest and Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection were widely interpreted as implying a ladder of success. Life evolved from low forms to higher and higher forms in a great chain of being. As Steven Jay Gould documented in his book
The Mismeasure of Man
, post-Darwin, “subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class structures, and sex roles would go forth under the banner of science.”
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The leading scientists of the day, Francis Galton, Samuel George Morton, and Paul Broca, contributed their measurements of the skull and the brain to demonstrate racial differences.

The leaders of craniometry were not conscious political ideologues. They regarded themselves as servants of their numbers, apostles of objectivity. And they confirmed all the common prejudices of comfortable white males—that blacks, women, and poor people occupy their subordinate roles by the harsh dictates of nature.
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Although it was understood by all that human beings occupied the top of the chain relative to other species, it was equally assumed by the Caucasian scientists of the day that their racial group held the loftiest position of all.
The scientists committed the fundamental attribution error by assuming that other human races were inferior for fixed, unforgiving biological reasons. Non-Caucasians, they argued, were obviously inferior in intellect because their brains were smaller. Although social Darwinism invited and encouraged the idea of ranking categories of human beings, a leading biologist of the era had already asserted the inferiority of non-Caucasian races nearly a decade before Darwin published the
Origin of Species
. In 1850, the famous naturalist and professor of zoology at Harvard University, Louis Agassiz, claimed that the Genesis account of Adam applied only to Caucasians.
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Thus, the racial science of Nazi Germany that came later certainly did not invent the notion of a superior race. Their innovation was the still more self-centered claim that members of the “Aryan race,” conceived as non-Jewish Caucasians, especially those with Nordic blood lines, were destined to dominate history.

The human genome project has now laid bare the nonsense of such claims of racial superiority. The out-of-Africa model supported by contemporary genetics asserts that we are all close genetic relatives, despite some relatively minor differences in p
hysiognomy. Across the globe, 85 to 90 percent of total genetic variation in human beings is found within any single population, such as Asians, Africans, or Caucasians.
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Individual differences reflecting variation between racial groups amounts to only 10 to 15 percent of the total variation. The relatively small variations attributable to group differences explain the perceptually obvious differences in facial features, such as the shape of the eyes and nose, hair texture, and skin color, as well as less visible traits, such as predispositions toward particular diseases or medical conditions (e.g., sickle-cell anemia or lactose intolerance). But the differences are far too small for biologists to classify all humans as anything but a single species, without meaningful divisions or subspecies. Biologists define subspecies or races in a strict biological sense when 25 to 30 percent of the variation is between groups; indeed, in clear cases of racial subgroups in other mammalian species, the figure reaches 60 to 80 percent.
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Although cultural or ethnic differences often divide peoples from different regions of the world, our genetic heritage largely fails to do so.

Think of different breeds of dogs as true racial groups in the biological sense. A sheltie is not a boxer, precisely because each racial group of dogs
has been carefully bred to achieve a unique genetic profile with a distinctive phenotypic appearance and temperament. The gene pools from populations of
Homo sapiens
located in different geographical regions show far too much overlap to be considered true biological races.

Even so, our ethnic and cultural differences are deeply embedded in the psychology of us versus them. The prejudice against those in the out-group is furthermore aggravated by the dispositional attribution made by the interpreter of the left hemisphere. The profound error of seeing “the other” as biologically distinct from us is a root cause of human misery. History has repeatedly shown that when societies are structured around racial categories and their ranking, trauma, poverty, and despair are in store for human beings in the out-group at the bottom of the ranking.

But it was not just ignorance of the human genome that contributed to the dispositional error made by the nineteenth-century scientists. Their racist rankings of brain size reveal to us how the interpreter of the left hemisphere could twist facts and dismiss contradictory evidence to affirm preconceived beliefs. As Stephen Jay Gould argued, the scientists did not commit fraud so much as self-deception. A hierarchy of the races supposedly emerged from measurements of cranial capacity. The idea was that a larger brain implied more intelligence, with White males topping all. Yet the measurements were suspicious and prone to subjective bias. For example, with measurements made by filling a skull specimen with mustard seed, one might easily overfill a White skull by packing the seed tightly. By contrast, knowing that a large Black skull would not fit one's preconceptions, filling the skull quickly with a few shakes, and most certainly no packing, would result in less volume of seed.
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In other cases, the data were selectively recorded or dismissed to fit racial preconceptions. By electing to throw out the smaller skull sizes of Hindus from his overall sample of Caucasians, a larger cranial capacity could be claimed for Causasians.
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This manipulation of the data was ironically justified on the grounds that the Hindu skulls from India were smaller than those of other nations. Working in the opposite direction, an unusually large number of Inca Peruvians were selectively included in the calculations because they tend to have smaller heads in general, and this pulled down the average for American Indians. Thus, by selective sampling it was possible to “prove”
that Caucasians have larger cranial capacities than do Indians. Of course, this was achieved by simply ignoring all the counterexamples. Were it possible to capture and replay the inner dialogue of such a scientist at work, doubtless the self-talk of his interpreter provided a convincing explanation of why the selective sampling was the right thing to do.

The males who dominated science in the nineteenth century also concluded that male brains were larger than female brains; it followed that males were considered more intelligent. Again, this patriarchal conclusion was reached by misinterpreting the evidence. Specifically, correction factors were selectively applied.
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For example, when confronted with an atypically large non-White male specimen, a correction factor of body size was introduced into the reasoning to explain away the so-called anomaly. Namely, it was duly noted that one needed to correct for the larger body size that went with the large head, so that the non-Caucasian skull was downsized to fit the racial preconceptions. However, this correction was not made in comparing male with female skulls. Because females tend to have smaller bodies than males, their head sizes naturally would tend to be smaller. But taking into account the ratio of head size to body size would work against the preconception that the male brain is largest. So, where a correction factor was used for race, it was selectively not used for sex.

The attributions made by the
left-hemisphere interpreter are especially important in determining human social perceptions of strangers who are different from us and fall outside our in-group identification. Cross-cultural research has shown that human beings make separate attributions about the stranger's degree of warmth versus coldness, on the one hand, and competence versus incompetence, on the other.
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For example, the poor and the homeless are often judged as lacking in warmth and in competence, eliciting an emotional response of contempt. We are making a judgment about whether the stranger intends to do us harm (a friendly, sincere, or warm person is unlikely to cause harm, whereas a sinister, untrustworthy, or cold person just might). At the same time, the interpreter makes an attribution about whether the stranger is capable of causing harm, if that is his or her intent.

For members of our immediate in-group, as well as social groups that we aspire to join, the interpreter readily attributes competence and warmth.
The emotion triggered by members of these reference groups is admiration. Given the demographic breakdown of the United States, it is not surprising that, according to survey responses, the groups that the majority identify with and admire consist of middle-class, White, and Christian individuals.
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The members of these groups are seen as good, admirable people. Notice that an attribution of competence is good for the in-group but bad for the out-group. In other words, the emotional reaction to competence is entirely different in the presence of an attribution of warmth (in-group members) compared with one of coldness (out-group members).

Outcasts of society, such as the homeless, are often seen as lacking both warmth and competence, eliciting feelings of contempt. Less vilified, because they have at least one dimension in common with the favoritism shown to the reference group, are the other two out-group prejudices. Some are seen as relatively high in warmth but low in competence. These groups, such as the elderly or the disabled, are stereotyped as benevolent and deserving of pity. Envy, on the other hand, is directed at those who are seen as threateningly competent and disliked. Envious prejudice has been directed at “nontraditional women, such as career women and feminists” and also “Asian Americans and other ‘model minorities’ stereotyped as excessively competent (too ambitious, too hardworking) and lacking sociability.”
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