How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

ASSUME “GOOD PERSON, BAD CIRCUMSTANCES”
At this point, we know that our assumptions about other people can dramatically
influence our interactions with them. Confirmation bias means that if we’re
anticipating that someone’s going to be dumb or annoying, we’ll subconsciously
pay disproportionate attention to the dumb or annoying things they say or do—
and even twist those observations a little until they confirm our hypothesis
(remember the gray/yellow bananas in 
Chapter 1
). But it goes further than that,
because if we then respond negatively to those perceived provocations, showing
frustration or irritation, it’s a sure way of putting the other person’s brain into
defensive mode—which makes it 
harder
for them to be brilliant and charming,

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and 
more
likely that they’ll behave dysfunctionally. When it comes to other
people, our negative assumptions can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And psychologists have found our habitual assumptions about other people
aren’t terribly forgiving. When we think about ourselves, we know that certain
aspects of our behavior are constrained by the circumstances we find ourselves
in. For example, if we get less work done today than we should have, part of the
story might be that we’re short on sleep, or we’re not feeling well, or we’re
waiting on some essential feedback from a colleague. But if we see someone 
else
doing less than we would expect, we tend to assume it reflects something
fundamental about that person’s capabilities or character—that they’re
incompetent or lazy, rather than tired or delayed. We rarely spend a lot of time
considering the reasons he or she might not be on their game today, especially if
we don’t know them very well. This tendency to attribute others’ weaknesses to
character rather than circumstances is something psychologists call the
fundamental attribution error.
6
Why do we judge others so much more harshly? Well, our brain’s automatic
system finds it simpler that way. It takes less mental energy to assess someone
once and then pigeonhole him or her forever—“Aah, Person X is not very
smart”—rather than analyze what might be going on with Person X every time
we see them. On high-stress days when our brains are overloaded with other
things to worry about, researchers have found that we’re even more likely to take
a shortcut by making this kind of generalization.
7
Early in her career at Harvard, Teresa Amabile and colleagues ran an
experiment that shows how the fundamental attribution error can harm
colleagues who are struggling at work. They took 120 people and nominated
some of them as “questioners,” who were asked to compose a series of difficult
general knowledge questions based on things they themselves already knew.
Another group, the “answerers,” was to do its best to answer the questions. The
interaction was watched by a third group, the “observers.” Afterward everyone
was asked to assess the intelligence of people they’d interacted with. Here’s
what’s startling: even though it was clear that the questioners had made up
questions based on their own esoteric interests, and this was why the answerers
struggled to get many questions right, all three groups rated the answerers as less
smart than the questioners. And the answerers were even harder on themselves
than the questioners.
8
Nobody seemed to accept that the answerers performed
less well because of the situation they’d been randomly placed in, rather than

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because of their innate intelligence.
So we make big assumptions about other people’s personalities and
capabilities based on very limited observations. When we find ourselves labeling
someone as dumb, lazy, or annoying, it should raise a red flag. How much of
that person’s behavior is driven by circumstance, and how much is driven by
character? Asking yourself this question doesn’t mean the other person isn’t
being irritating 
right now
—but it can lower the tension considerably if you can
conceive of him or her being a good person in bad circumstances.
Here’s what I suggest when someone has infuriated or disappointed you: