Ranthropologist

Tag: context

  • Logical Fallacies: Attribution Error

    Logical Fallacies: Attribution Error

    How many times have you honked your horn in anger or raised your middle finger at some idiot while driving? Have you ever seethed inwardly as some dawdler wastes time at the checkout counter while you are waiting behind them in line? Do you assume that the person who took up two spaces in the parking lot is a complete asshole? On the other hand, how many times have people honked at you or flipped you off as you sheepishly realize that you accidentally went out of turn at a four-way stop? Have you felt the back of you neck burning with the stares of people behind you at a checkout line as you realize you entered your PIN incorrectly or forgot to give the cashier a coupon? How about having to park awkwardly between the lines because another car was partially blocking the space? But you’re not a bad person, right? Those other people, though…

    When you believe that your actions can be explained by situational factors, but other people’s actions can be explained by their personalities, you are succumbing to a particular type of attribution bias known as fundamental attribution error. Attribution bias involves the human tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior by attributing it to causes that may actually have nothing to do with the behavior. Overall, we tend to explain our own actions, or the actions of those we know well, as being due to situations and not due to something fundamental about our personality. Conversely, when it comes to explaining the behavior of people we don’t know, we are much more likely to explain it as a function of who they are without taking contextual factors into account. Essentially, we are judging a book by its cover.

    Attribution errors occur in the public sphere all the time. If you have ever made the mistake of getting sucked into the comment page rabbit hole accompanying articles about controversial issues, you know what I am talking about. So often, we are only given a tantalizing tidbit of information in an article, but that’s all it takes to trigger a cascade of attribution error. I find this troubling. One of the classic examples of attribution error is the case of the Albuquerque woman who sued McDonald’s after she spilled hot coffee into her lap. This case took the media by storm and eventually became a cultural touchstone for describing apparently frivolous lawsuits. The vitriol that rained down on Stella Liebeck was thick and furious. She was obviously an idiot for resting the coffee cup between her legs. She shouldn’t have been driving with hot coffee in the first place, so she must be a careless person in general. She clearly was just out to get McDonald’s because they have deep pockets. How dare she sue for an incident that was clearly her own fault? She was just trying to get rich off McDonald’s! It turns out that the reality of Liebeck’s case was much, much different than the public perception of events. There is a reason the jury awarded such a huge amount of money when they heard the case – it is because they heard the facts and made their decision based on those facts. In hearing the facts, the possibility of attribution error was dramatically reduced. I strongly encourage you to read the facts in the case if you are one of those who has never heard them. There is even a documentary film about the case called Hot Coffee, which explains how Leibeck’s case got so distorted.

    I started thinking about this the other day when I was reading a Jezebel article about a woman in Ontario, Canada who hit three teenage boys with her car, injuring two and killing one. She is suing a whole host of people in connection with the case, including the dead boy. I reacted as most people probably would when I read the article: this woman is clearly a monster. She was speeding. She may have been talking on her cell phone. She killed a kid and badly injured two others! What kind of awful scum of humanity would dare to sue the families involved in this tragedy, much less sue the dead kid? And I was not surprised when I scrolled down to the comments and saw that many posters felt as I did. But as is my general practice, after getting over my initial reaction I started to wonder about the context of the situation. How fast was she actually going? Is there any evidence supporting the allegation that she was on her phone? What about the kids? Did they ride into her path? What time of day was it? What is the context? What are the facts? It turns out that it was dark when the boys were hit. They were wearing dark clothes. They were riding side-by-side along the road. Now, I’m certainly not blaming the victims here, but it sounds like this situation was ripe for potential tragedy and that they were struck by accident. Even the most attribution-biased among us probably don’t believe that the driver hit the boys deliberately. And if you’re like me, you also start to think about your own, personal context. I rarely drive the exact speed limit. I wouldn’t say I’m a speed demon, but 5-10 miles above the limit is pretty par for the course. I’ve also been guilty of taking calls while driving… sending and receiving text messages… even checking social media. (And just FYI, nowadays when I feel the temptation to use my phone while driving I ask myself if it’s worth a life to do it. The answer is always no.). If I were to hit and injure or kill someone under those circumstances, I would be crippled with guilt and shame… but would it mean I am a monster?

    You may be saying to yourself that this is all well and good, but what in the world could ever justify this woman suing the dead boy and the families for emotional trauma? What kind of person would do such a thing? She must be a monster! I think this is the point at which we must pause and ask ourselves what we might feel if the same thing happened to us. This appears to have been a terrible accident. I don’t know about you, but if I hit and killed someone, whether I was at fault or not, I would be devastated. That devastation would probably manifest itself physically as well as emotionally. I would live it over and over and suffer terrible guilt, grief, and shame. And I’d also have to defend myself in the court of public opinion as well as the civil court. Of course, the driver in this case is being sued by the victims’ families. And she is countersuing because that’s what lawyers tell you to do in cases like this. It’s a tactic you use to protect yourself in the court system so that if the judgement comes down against you, you have some protection from financial ruin. I don’t know about Canada, but in the United States this is a fairly typical situation that happens at the behest of insurance companies who don’t want to be the ones paying out a big settlement. There may well be more to this situation, but I don’t think it’s fair to automatically paint the driver as a soulless monster without at least attempting to learn more about the context.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the driver in this case is blameless. But that’s not the point. The point it that our knee-jerk attribution error paints people as one-dimensional villains and allows little room for the nuances and subtleties that arise when we look at a situation in its complete context. I can say the same about people we canonize as heroes! Just as the driver in this case is probably not a demon incarnate, people who do heroic things may also not be overall nice people. We are all complex, multidimensional creatures, and it would behoove us to remember that when attribution error tempts us to label people with a single dimension.

  • Additive Outrage

    Additive Outrage

    Rat poison saved my life. I know how strange that sounds, but it’s true. In July 2003 I was hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism – a blood clot in my lung. The treatment is blood thinners – IV heparin while in the hospital for a week, then oral warfarin – brand name Coumadin – for six months afterwards to keep dissolving the clot and to prevent a recurrence. Warfarin is an anti-coagulant, and it happens to be very effective as a rodenticide by causing fatal internal bleeding in rats that ingest it in the form of poison baits. So what’s the takeaway? It’s really quite simple: the dose makes the poison.

    I bring this up because I have noticed that it doesn’t take much to frighten people by telling them about “disgusting” or “scary” or “poisonous” stuff that shows up in food. This absolutely, positively requires a great deal of skepticism and critical thinking. Case in point: I ran across an article in the Huffington Post that capitalizes directly on this sort of fear-mongering. Titled “9 Disgusting Things You Didn’t Know You’ve Been Eating Your Whole Life,” the article runs through a list of food additives that are apparently supposed to make us feel like the food industry is bent on poisoning its customers. Now, I’m not stupid; I’m well aware that there is all sorts of stuff in our food that is not exactly healthy, and even some stuff that could be dangerous. I am concerned about modern eating habits (my own included!) and think it’s rather frightening how removed we are from the process of providing food for millions of people. In fact, when I teach the section on subsistence in my cultural anthropology classes, I ask my students to think about what they would eat if the world as we know it came to an end. Do they have the remotest inkling of what they would eat if there were no grocery stores or restaurants? And even if they talk about hunting, I ask them, when the bullets run out, how will you kill animals? Do you know how to prepare them? How will you keep that food from spoiling? What plant foods will you eat? I have no doubt that when the shit hits the fan for humanity, those few cultural groups that still forage or practice horticulture and pastoralism will be the only survivors, with a few exceptions for those who have learned skills for living off the land in nations like the United States (although even these few won’t survive as long-term populations unless they meet other people and are able to form larger groups that can sustain population growth).

    So what does any of this have to do with the HuffPo article? My real point is that people get unreasonably frightened or disgusted by things without thinking through why they are frightened or disgusted. The first thing on the list in the article is castoreum. This is a substance that is produced in the anal sacs of beavers, and even I have to admit that it sounds pretty disgusting. It is used as a flavoring similar to vanilla, although according to Wikipedia the food industry in the US only uses about 300 pounds of it a year. My problem with this is the automatic reaction that some parts of the animal are not acceptable for food use and others are. The way we use animal parts is culturally determined and completely arbitrary. Why is castoreum any more disgusting than drinking the liquid that shoots out of a cow teat? Some people eat tongue – why is that body part any worse than eating the ground up flesh from a pig’s side? What about eggs, which are essentially the menstrual flow of a chicken contained in a shell? Disgust, again, is culturally determined and therefore ultimately arbitrary from an objective standpoint.

    Other things listed in the article include L-cysteine, which is one of the amino acids that is found in human hair; sand; coal tar; anti-freeze; and a few others. The human hair bit is similar to the beaver anal secretions bit – we just knee-jerk find it disgusting, but it’s not as if there is actual human hair in your food! Every single living thing is made of amino acids, so you could make the argument that any food that contains an amino acid is part, I don’t know, semen? Bile? Blood? In other words, without the full background of the chemical all you read is that human hair has a component that is processed into a food additive and the implication is that you are directly consuming hair. As for the things like anti-freeze and coal tar, reference back to the dose making the poison. Once again, it’s not like food companies are pouring Prestone into your food. The ingredient in question is called propylene glycol, which has many of the same properties as ethylene glycol, which is what is actually used in automobile antifreeze. Propylene glycol is not only used in food but in medications that are not soluble in water – so much like warfarin, propylene glycol in the right dose and formulation has important medical applications.

    I could go through the list one by one, but I’m hoping that these examples make my point that so much information and context is left out of articles like this. I really don’t understand the desire to frighten and disgust people by only focusing on shock value rather than useful information. Again, I want to stress that I realize there are bad things in our food, and I am firmly committed to the idea that most companies are more concerned about their bottom line than they are about the health and safety of consumers; but it’s also important to remember that if companies sicken or kill their customers they won’t be in business for long! And I know that plenty of people automatically distrust government agencies like the FDA, but again, what does the FDA gain by allowing truly dangerous chemicals to be part of the food supply? It behooves us to think very carefully about this sort of thing.

    A final point: in reading the comments at the end of the HuffPo article, I was amazed at the self-righteousness and privilege of many of the contributors. So many bragged about only eating fresh food from the farmers’ market or making their own bread or only buying organically raised meat or making baby food from scratch or blah blah blah. Have these people ever been outside their privileged little bubble and considered how the real world works for so many people? Farmers’ markets are great – if there’s one in your neighborhood and you can afford to pay the premium prices. Organic meat? Only if there is a fancy grocery store nearby and you want to pay double the price. Food made from scratch? Sure, if you have the time and the tools and the money for the often pricey ingredients. It’s terrific that a lot of people are trying to get back to basics with food prep – I myself make bread from scratch – but it fails to recognize the deep inequality and lack of access to resources that so many people in the United States, and the world, have to contend with – but that’s a rant for another time.