The cockroach's fault?

Last week I met up with a friend of mine at a coffee joint.

And what I expected was a happy catching up session, but however she came with a dark cloud over her head and was looking really angry.

See here’s the thing, she just had a minor car accident on her way to meet me. Its ok she wasn’t hurt or anything BUT she was driving her boyfriend’s SUV. She just bumped up a bit of the front bumper. So she called her boyfriend to tell him about the car and accident. Immediately after asking if she was ok, her boyfriend started blaming her for being a lousy driver and damaging his new car. He said that it’s her fault as she is a careless person, who is easily distracted. He also commented that she is a lazy person, who never checks her blind spot before moving the car. Blah blah blah….etc

All the time he was ranting in the phone trying to explain why the accident happen when he wasn’t even there to witness it. So inevitably, my friend hung up the phone call and switched off her phone.

So I ended up listening to her telling me how the accident occurred. As usual she was driving along the road, going to make a turn when this BIG FAT FLYING cockroach appeared out of no where and flew on to HER FACE!!!! Can you believe that? (By the way she is really really really scared of cockroach, and as if BIG FAT FLYING cockroach is not good enough to scare the shit out of her pants, of all place it chose her face to do the landing)

Of course, her nature reaction was to use her hands and swept it off her face. (Which girl who fear cockroach won’t do the same thing?) So both of her hands was not on the steering wheel for around 3 seconds when the car front bumper “kissed” the back bumper of the car in front of her boyfriend’s SUV. And the cockroach was no where to be seen then, the culprit for this accident have obviously went into hiding inside the car while my friend handled everything. (My friend was so angry with the cockroach, after our catching up session; we went to buy Baygon as a treat to the cockroach that causes the accident. And yes she made me kill it for her, the funny thing was she was still so freaked out when I show her the corpse.)

Enough of cockroach story already, applying the context of the situation mentioned above, it seems that the reason why her boyfriend attributed all the blame of the accident to her was because he made a fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behavior is due to internal dispositional factors and underestimating situational factors when assessing a particular event.

According to my friend’s boyfriend, it seems that the occurrence of the accident was purely due to the internal attributions (e.g personality, ability, motivation, attitudes, and values) of my friend. Factors highlighted by him that caused were laziness, carelessness, incompetence, lousy driving ability. It had never occurred to him that there could be external attributions (e.g chance/luck, situational constraints, and influence of others) present that contributed towards the accident. Thus he had made a fundamental attribution error when he passed judgment assessing the cause of the accident.

The underlying source of fundamental attribution error is the correspondence bias. Correspondence bias refers to the tendency to assume that people’s doings and words reflect their personality, their attitudes, or some other internal factor, rather than external or situational factors.

As suggested by research, there are three different causes that attribute towards correspondence bias.

They are:

• We simply overlook or are unaware of situational factors that influence other people’s behavior.

• We simply underestimate the power of situational factors, even when we notice external factors.

• The process of taking situational factors into account requires cognitive resources which may not be always available.

In application to my friend’s boyfriend I personally think that option number 2 is more appropriate. I guess he simply underestimates how much fear can be caused to a woman when a cockroach flies on to her face. (Ok if i hate himI can choose option 3, but he is my friend too.)

In conclusion, it seems that we can never really draw a clear cut line between attributing success and failure to either internal or external factors. People assessing the event in different perspective tend to also interpret the event differently that lead to a diversity of conclusions. So you can say that conclusions made are dependent on the perspective that we choose to take.

So which side are you on?