Featured Article

August: Can't Get It Out of My Head

Subscribe to Dr Sapadin's PsychWisdom Columns [click here]

Judging Yourself, Judging Others

Take a moment to reflect on the worst thing that you’ve ever done. It could be something fairly recent or way back in your past. Don’t just settle for a minor faux pas. Keep thinking until you’ve hit upon something that was really bad.

"...remember some shameful act of yours"

If you cannot remember something you did that could have landed you in jail or mortified you if it had been front page news, congratulations. You are either a saint or skilled at repressing what you don’t want to remember.

Now, for those of you who do remember some shameful act of yours, how do you explain it? Don’t continue reading until you come up with an explanation.

Okay. Now that you have a plausible reason as to why you did what you did, let me guess what you said. Your explanation was probably similar to one of these:

“I had too much to drink.”
“I was young.”
“I was angry.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“I went along with the crowd.”
“It was a stupid impulse.”
“I didn’t know any better.”
“It was a dare.”
“I was afraid.”
“Someone told me to do it.”
“I thought I was being cool.”
“I was out of my mind.”

Now picture someone else doing something similar today. What would be your explanation for the behavior? Being the rational person that you are, you might be tempted to think about the same reason you just mentioned for yourself. But, in reality, it’s likely that your response would be radically different - especially if somebody close to you had done it.

Your response might well have sounded like this:

“What’s the matter with you?”
“What kind of a person are you?”
“Don’t you have any values?”
“How could you do that?”
“How could you even think that?”
“You’re pathetic.”
“How stupid could you be?”
“You’re not the person I married.”
“Didn’t I teach you anything?”
“I can’t even look at you.”
“You gross me out.”
“You’re one sick puppy”
Why should one explanation be so radically different from the other?

When making a judgment about another’s bad behavior, people tend to attribute enduring personality or character traits as the cause, such as he’s irresponsible, she’s stupid. Yet when judging our own lapses, we tend to be more tolerant. Sure, we may feel awful about what we did, but we’re more likely to explain it by citing situational or temporary factors such as, a lapse in judgment, peer pressure, mood or substance abuse.

So, who is right? Is our behavior more influenced by our personality or by the situation we find ourselves in? As much as we would like to believe that we are masters of our domain, studies show that we are much more influenced by situational factors than we would like to believe.

Our readiness to go along with the crowd, to obey authority, to respond impulsively is a truth about human nature that some would prefer to discount. Yet, intuitively we know this is true. Why else would parents be wary when their kids start hanging out with the wrong crowd? Or a spouse gets too chummy with a friend of the opposite sex?

Studies show that situational factors often entice us to act differently from the way we usually act. They also indicate that we’re poor judges of our own propensity to stray from our ideals, believing that we act better than we actually do.

Not that you know what is called a “fundamental attribution error”, in the name of fairness, wouldn’t it be a good idea to judge another’s lapse of judgment at least as kindly as you judge your own?

Subscribe to Dr Sapadin's PsyhcWisdom Columns [click here]