Photo from NeONBRAND--Upsplash
She didn’t exactly whack the back of my head when she lifted the
lid on the overhead compartment in the plane, but she did hit it.
“Watch your head,” she said matter-of-factly, after she
hit me.
Since I was removing my jacket from the overhead compartment on
my side of the aisle at the time, I hadn’t expected to be hit.
“I didn’t know I needed to watch,” I said.
“These things are so poorly design” she responded, and then
gathered her belonging and hurried out of the aircraft.
Everyone on the plane seemed a bit tired of sitting knee-to-knee
on a small regional jet, but I was a bit taken aback by her response to banging
my head. Her behavior made me think of a book I finished recently, Mistakes
Were Made (but not by me). Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson assert how little
we know about how we are experienced by others and how difficult it is for us
to learn.
For instance, I doubt that the woman in the plane would want to
be perceived as rude or ill-mannered. My guess is that in her hurry to get off
the plane she raised the compartment lid too quickly and unintentionally hit me
in the process. Given her response, it’s likely she was embarrassed.
She might have apologized or inquired about my well-being, but
that would have been an admission, of sorts, of her part in the head hitting.
Instead, she issued a belated warning to me and then commented on the design
flaw of the airplane. While I was a bit surprised, Tavris and Aronson suggest
this tendency is very common and not all that surprising. If we dislike certain
kinds of behavior and then find ourselves engaging in those same actions, we
have to find a way to excuse what we’ve done. In social psychology circles,
this is known as self-justification or the self-serving bias.
Photo by Ino Carolina -- Upsplash
When someone engages in self-justification, it can sound as if
they’re lying, but there is a difference. Tavris and Aronson (2007) suggest
that self-justification is “more powerful and more dangerous” because “it
allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they
could have done” (p.4) at the time. I wonder how many acts we see described in
the nightly news would fall into the category of self-justification.
Tavris and Aronson describe cognitive dissonance as the “engine
that drives self-justification” (p. 13). Cognitive dissonance occurs when we
have two thoughts or perspectives that are psychologically inconsistent (e.g.,
“Punctuality is important;” and “I’m late again.”) When this happens, it is so
uncomfortable we often seek to rationalize our behavior.
Instead of: “I’m sorry I was late. I should have left earlier,”
we say, “That traffic was terrible. They really need to do something about the
streets.
Instead
of: “I over-reacted. I’m sorry I got so angry,” we say, “If you had just
explained what you wanted with more detail, I would have been fine.”
Mistakes Were Made caused me to think about a
lot of things. I wondered how often I really worked to understand a perspective
other than my own. I pondered how others might experience what I see as my own
perfectly logical behavior. I considered a very human tendency to give myself a
pass on less than favorable behavior, while nailing the same flaw in others.
It’s not comfortable thinking, but if I want to avoid the justification of
foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts, I probably need to do more of
it.
Mistakenly yours, more often than I would like to admit,
Jennifer L. Baker
Mistakenly yours, more often than I would like to admit,
Jennifer L. Baker
No comments:
Post a Comment