DFW and the Fundamental Attribution Error

A couple of weeks ago I decided to revisit David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon College commencement address from May 21, 2005.  It was subsequently revised and published as "This Is Water."  (The audio and various text editions, including a transcription of the original speech and one cleaned up, are easily available on the web.)  Among many things that struck me upon both rereading and listening to the address, one thing jumped out in particular.  And I think it is one key reason that DFW's address went viral back then and is still discussed now.

It is that he vividly connects our lives with a social psychological truth.  That truth is also a susceptibility.  Mr. Wallace masterly describes it -- this weakness, this proclivity.  Because we all have it, we feel implicated, indicted, and yet also, perhaps surprisingly, bettered by DFW's pointing it out.

What is it?  It is what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: "The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on others' behavior" (D. G. Myers, Exploring Social Psychology, 6th ed., p. 71).

Here is an example.  Suppose two people were in a debate club, and suppose that participants were assigned which side of a topic they would have to defend.  Further suppose that you knew that the position for which a person advocated was mandated, that the participants did not have any choice.  The fundamental attribution error occurs when you find yourself thinking, despite this knowledge, that the person who defended, say, a government requirement for citizens to eat broccoli really holds that view herself rather than because of the circumstance.  You assume, in other words, that there is something about who she is deep down as a person that endorses such government regulation of life.

Or, again, suppose a violent sociopath sees that you drop your wallet in the mall, picks it up, and runs after you to return it.  You commit the fundamental attribution error when you attribute this action to a good, benevolent, caring character rather than the circumstantial fact, say, that he happened to be in a good mood because he had just received a free cinnamon roll, his favorite.  (Yes, people are clinically proven to be temporarily kinder in such situations.)

David Foster Wallace, speaking in Boston, Jan. 16, 2006

Now, let me say for the record that not every influence is circumstantial, and where there are circumstantial influences they do not always predominate.  Dispositional influences do exist.  They are powerful, often decisive.  Some might even say that, whether because of biology or character or both, they are inescapable. However, circumstantial influences also exist. We must be cognizant of them, of how they may commingle with influences from character, and of the potential error, more frequently committed than we might like to admit, of mistakenly or overly attributing to disposition what stems from situation.

We all know this at some level, and that is what leads me back to Mr. Wallace's captivating commencement address.  Why?  Because in the rough and tumble of daily life we so often forget it.  He reminds us of it.  But more than that, he candidly explains in a way that resonates why we might want to avoid this error and to change our disposition in our situations.

Mr. Wallace denies that he is giving moral advice or telling his hearers how they are supposed to think and act.  Here we might draw upon his own words to point out why, in his automatic certainty, he might be "totally wrong."

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.

The genius of this speech, and of Mr. Wallace's approach, is that he does in fact provide moral and social psychological advice even when he denies it; however, when he does, we do not feel that slimy duplicity of a politician's employing praeteritio.  Instead, we feel the sincerity of someone with skin in the game, who is struggling daily just as we are.

And so, in his own way, Mr. Wallace implores us to alter our character, to be more other-centered, as much as he may deny it.  Or maybe that is not quite right.  Maybe he less urges us to be concerned about others than he nudges us to be more aware of them -- sympathy, not necessarily empathy.  Perhaps that is not it either.  Maybe it is "just" the invitation for us to be aware that our story is not the only one playing on the big screen; the people in our lives who might annoy us and frustrate us and anger us and consume us have their stories, too.

... it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. … 

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is:  I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

"[L]ook at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem" -- the fundamental attribution error, focusing on their persons, their disposition, and making physiognomic aspersions to justify one's prejudices.  But there is another way of, well, "looking" at things, Mr. Wallace reminds us:

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way.

Mr. Wallace is pointing us, in a word he does not use, to charity -- charity to others despite the tendency to fixate selfishly on ourselves.  He is also asking us to cultivate our imagination in light of charity.

He is admirably and winsomely realistic:  "...it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to."  But he encourages us to use our heads to get out of our heads:

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

This is, Mr. Wallace contends, what it means to learn to think, the value of a liberal arts education.  The value lies less in how to think than what to think about.  He has a point.  A key part of becoming educated or just becoming practically wise in what one thinks is becoming discerning in what one chooses to think about (or not think about).  But isn't this also what it means to become a good reader:  someone who knows what to focus and reflect on?

As I have put it on this blog's front page, "Reading may involve texts, but it may also involve art, events, and people. Cultivating practical wisdom requires reading well the pluriformity of all that we can read" -- including, as DFW says, "the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life."  What we think about and how we "read," then, are inextricably linked. Can one really control the content of what one thinks about without also controlling how one thinks in the first place?  Becoming wise involves both.

One place to start this process of becoming wise is to read aright, or better, the relationship between situational and dispositional influences in others' lives -- and in our own.  And so we observe yet another benefit of Mr. Wallace's commencement address.  In it he models three of the tools that will be indispensable to this task:  humility, imagination, and charity.