Everyday Evil, Part 1: The Fundamental Attribution Error

In October I was planning on speaking to church leaders in the Portland area as a part of ACU's Elderlink program. Unfortunately, my blog was considered to be too controversial for some of those organizing the event. So, I won't be going.

However, I had begun to work on my materials for the engagement. After conversations with my good friend Mark Love, I was planning to speak about "Everyday Evil." Since I'm not attending Elderlink I thought I'd share some of my prepared material here.

The thesis of Everyday Evil is this: All of us are capable of evil. Much of the evil in the world has been and still is committed by people just like you and me. Evil isn't a malevolent force that randomly attacks people. It is, rather, a suite of social psychological forces that slowly engulf the unsuspecting. My goal in presenting this material is to highlight how we ill serve our faith communities by viewing evil in ontological terms. We need to see evil as a social psychological phenomenon. If we do this I believe we can work more effectively and prophylactically in our faith communities.

To start, I want to talk about the fundamental attribution error (FAE).

The FAE is a widely known attributional error observed in social psychological research. The FAE is the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors over situational factors in explaining human behavior. Phrased another way, we tend to see the things going on inside of a person (e.g., traits, personality, motives, desires) as more important than the forces outside of the person (e.g., context, social pressures) in determining behavior. Basically, we downplay the power of context and situation.

In the language of philosophy, the FAE suggests that we tend to see people in a Platonic terms. That is, we are essentialists. We think that people have an "essence," an inner core that dictates and determines the actions of the person. Thus, we think the world is populated by different "kinds" of people. Good people. Bad people. Strong people. Weak people. Saints. Sinners.

But all these labels are just instances of the fundamental attribution error. There aren't "kinds" of people. There aren't good people or bad people. There are simply people in situations. Configure the situation a certain way and we can make some people look weak and others strong.

This is not to say that situations wholly determine our behavior. Just that we tend to dramatically, and often catastrophically, underestimate the power of context and situation. And it is this "underestimate of context" that sets us up for evil.

In practical terms, the FAE suggests this: We tend to overestimate the strength of our character. That is, we tend to apply labels to ourselves, seeing ourselves in Platonic terms. We see ourselves adjectivally. As a "kind" of person. A good father. A good husband. And so on.

But the FAE suggests that to see myself in this way is a mistake. A potentially costly one. I'm not a "good" husband. I'm a husband who is fortunate enough to be in a good situation. But if I fail to realize this distinction, I can mismanage my situations and run the risk to falling into moral darkness.

Let me use an example that applies to me as a Christian husband. How many "good" "Christian" husbands fall into affairs? Are these men "bad"? Did they not love their wives? To look at what happened in those terms misses the point. What in all likelihood happened is that these men very slowly, and generally unintentionally, placed themselves in situations where pressures slowly worked away at them. To speak bluntly, it really does one little good to say you love your wife. What matters is to avoid situations because you love you wife.

This model applies to all moral issues. It applies to issues of addiction, sexuality, spending, violence, time management and on and on. Across these domains, situations will have way more power than what we think. Consequently, too many "good" people blindly wander into situations that cause them to morally falter.

So the first lesson in dealing with everyday evil is this: Treat your virtue with the utmost suspicion. Don't view yourself in Platonic terms. Think of yourself contextually and situationally. And as you do this, never allow yourself to believe your character is sufficient to carry you through. The history of everyday evil is riddled with the ruined lives of those who said, "I don't know how I could have done that. It's just not like me."

Exactly.