Seeing the world around us

Our experience of the world is a strange and unique thing.

The perspective we bring to our interpretations of events, the actions of others, and what we witness are essentially personal fictions. For each of us they are as concrete and real as the chair we may be sitting upon and the phone into which we are thumbing text messages. The only trouble with that is that it is a dubious reality. Our experience of our reality is a manifestation of our attention (Where), focus (What), action (How) and interaction (Who/What). Due to constant shifts in those four parameters our reality shifts and, fittingly enough, it seems the reason for this is that we are hard wired to keep telling ourselves lies.

Really.

To explore this we need to take a slight detour into the world of cognitive theory so we can begin to understand what we are up against when we try to change our own behavior, let alone the actions of others, or an organization’s culture. A striking example of our inability to see the world as it is can be seen in realm of attribution theory. The “fundamental attribution error” (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is a cognitive theory that describes how we are driven to use our perception and assessment of personality-based explanations of observed behaviors, devaluing the situation in which we observe those behaviors, in assessing the motives, capabilities and behaviors of others. In this context a person behaving pleasantly, treating others well, may be considered a polite and considerate individual regardless of the fact that they may only be behaving in this manner because of social etiquette demands.

I had an opportunity to observe a clear example of this bias as part of a presentation on managing risk and uncertainty during the last day of a the delivery of a three day training program. I had read of a simple experiment designed to demonstrate fundamental attribution error and was keen to try it in a live setting. I asked the program attendees to write down a question related to their own area of subject matter expertise. A selection of questions related to the risk associated with their expertise were to be asked by ten randomly selected participants and answered by me. Before beginning the process of answering the sampled questions I asked the group to decide how many questions they thought I would answer correctly. The average was seven. The group then selected the first person to ask a question who, after I had failed to provide the correct response, selected the next person from the group to ask a question and so on until ten questions had been asked and answered. The end result, one out of ten was answered correctly.

Why the difference between expectations and outcome? It’s a matter of how they had been primed over the duration of the course.

Essentially, the group made a fundamental attribution error based on their experience of me as a subject matter expert leading their program for three days. I had been the primary provider of their learning experience, guiding and teaching them, and at times successfully fielding quite challenging questions. As a consequence when asked to “test” their perception of my capabilities they extended my personal demonstrated subject matter expertise to an understanding of their own.