The Joy of Pain (30 page)

It is so easy, perhaps automatic, to infer dispositional, internal causes for other people's behavior—so much so that it can require focus and effort to correct this initial, automatic inference even when situational factors warrant it. A series of studies by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues shows this. In one study, participants watched a video of a woman acting in a nervous and anxious way while conversing with a man. Viewers could not hear the conversation, but subtitles on the screen told them the topics being discussed: embarrassing topics (e.g., sexual fantasies) in one condition and mundane topics (e.g., hobbies) in another. As one would expect, subsequent ratings of “dispositional anxiousness” were greater in the hobbies condition than in the sexual fantasies condition. Highlighting this situational constraint affected judgments, as viewers
inferred that being asked to discuss an embarrassing topic could make a person anxious. But if someone was anxious when discussing hobbies, then “personality” was the stronger cause of the anxious behavior. More interesting was what happened in two additional conditions. Viewers watched one of the two videos, but this time they were also asked to rehearse a set of word strings at the same time. Ratings of dispositional anxiousness in
both
conditions resembled the rating made in the ‘hobbies' condition
without
the additional cognitive task. Evidently, viewers having the additional, distracting task failed to take into account the implications of the conversation topic on anxious behavior. The woman
acted
in an anxious way, and therefore she was
perceived
as dispositionally anxious.
¹³

These and other experiments led to the conclusion that the causal attributions for behavior we observe in others start by automatically inferring a dispositional cause. The man gets angry with the nurse, he is a hostile person; the man continues to shock the learner, he is a sadistic person; the woman is behaving nervously, she is a nervous person, and so on. There is a straight and easy path from behavior to inferring disposition that requires little cognitive effort. We may then “correct” the dispositional inference if we are made aware of situational factors that counter our initial impression. The man is not a hostile person because his wife is severely injured; the man is not sadistic because he is only doing what most people would do in this situation; the woman is not an anxious person because she is discussing an embarrassing topic. The problem is that correcting our first impressions is much less automatic. And there are innumerable ways that this correction will be prevented from ever happening. Furthermore, we have a plentiful supply of seductive personality labels that are difficult to avoid using (such as “jerk,” “sadist,” and “neurotic”) and fewer labels to describe circumstances (such as “it was a tough situation”).
¹⁴

Awareness of this attribution tendency provides at least an opportunity for a more complex explanation for someone's behavior, which might avert the instant flow of guilt-free
schadenfreude
. There is a clear lesson to be learned from our tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error: we would do well to make a conscious effort to learn more about the circumstances that might have caused a misfortune happening to another. Situational factors will compete on an even playing field with dispositional factors in our efforts
to explain what happened. In the process, we might find ourselves less likely to laugh or smile.

It is certainly easy to find fun in the humiliation of people when we can enjoy self-righteous superiority over them or when they appear to richly deserve what they get. The strong tendency to make dispositional attributions for other people's actions is one reason this type of fun is so common. But some people succeed better than others in resisting the tendency. My boss was an example. I cannot think of a better way to sum it up than to say that he had wisdom. Perhaps he also had a greater natural empathy for others, but I think that life taught him to focus first on the circumstances that can shape people's behavior, especially if someone had failed or suffered from his actions. When those around my boss were quick to blame people for their failures, he bucked the instant consensus either by his silence or by offering an alternative, less condemning explanation. Did we ever catch him feeling
schadenfreude
? Of course. The emotion is part of everyone's DNA. But it was never malicious, and his wisdom moderated its prevalence.

There was a touch of Abraham Lincoln in my boss. Lincoln is admired by anyone who becomes familiar with the details of his life. Early in his political career in the Illinois state legislature, he made the mistake of making fun of a fellow legislator, James Shields, by publishing satirical letters about him. Lincoln had used a pseudonym, but Shields found out, felt his honor offended, and challenged Lincoln to a duel. Together with friends on both sides, Lincoln found a way to convince Shields to call off the duel, but not until it got close to happening. This experience taught Lincoln important lessons. Ashamed by the incident, he avoided harsh satire of others in print from then on. His stump speeches could be lively in their pointed humor aimed at his opponents, but even this habit disappeared over time.
¹⁵
He was so talented in mimicry and so perceptive about the human condition that these were hard habits to reverse
completely, but when he lapsed, he felt chagrined and apologized.
¹⁶
He walked away from fights, laughed off insults, and rejected opportunities to mock and humiliate.
¹⁷

Taking the perspective of others seemed to come naturally to Lincoln. He learned how to handle people effectively through tact, which he once defined as, “the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”
¹⁸
Many accounts of Lincoln's life highlight the famous incident of his writing a critical letter to General George Meade after the battle of Gettysburg.
¹⁹
Lincoln had suffered many frustrations with his generals. There had been so many missed opportunities due to incompetence or the lack of initiative in these men, but the Union victory at Gettysburg could have been a fatal blow to the Confederacy. After many clashes with terrible losses on both sides, Meade had prevailed over the Confederate army under General Robert E. Lee, causing Lee to retreat across the Potomac to regroup and to prevent complete defeat. Retreat was slowed by flooding along the river, yet Meade failed to take this opportunity to crush Lee's army, despite explicit urgings from Lincoln by telegraph and special messenger. Thus, Lee had the time to build bridges that allowed his army's escape. Meade's failure to act exasperated Lincoln, and he penned a letter expressing his feelings. This is how part of it reads:

My dear General … You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him, but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit; and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him. … I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within our easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few—no
more than 2/3's of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it. …
²⁰

Meade, sensitive to criticism, had already learned of Lincoln's frustration through other channels and had threatened to resign because he felt the criticism undeserved. But Meade never read the letter. It was found in Lincoln's materials after his death. On this letter, Lincoln wrote, “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.” According to historians, Lincoln saw no point in further upsetting General Meade, who had served the Union cause mightily. As distressed as Lincoln was by Meade's inaction, he was able to suppress the impulse to send the letter.

Lincoln did not care for alcohol, especially whiskey, because he disliked the effect it had on his thinking and on his self-control. But if others wanted to drink, this was fine. In his early days, he frequented the company of heavy drinkers and could enjoy their company even as he refused to drink. Mostly notably, he did not condemn alcoholics, unlike many others who did. In fact, he felt pity and compassion—because he recognized that alcohol could often have special hold on even the best of people—this “tyrant of spirits,” as he called it.
²¹

Lincoln's sensitivity to the situational factors affecting other people's behavior was not at the expense of a sense of humor. Lincoln delighted in jokes which, when he was present, were “plenty and blackberried,”
²²
even bad puns. He was able to tell funny yarns about people so vividly that people's “sides were sore with laughing,” according to President Van Buren.
²³
But he was rarely unkind in his joking.
²⁴
Lincoln used humor to put people at ease. If he did laugh at people's misfortunes, it was amusement that recognized human frailties that he himself shared.
²⁵
Indeed, much of Lincoln's humor was directed at himself, especially at what he considered his “ugly” face.
²⁶

And so, Lincoln, for all his remarkable talents for seeing the humor in people's behavior, matured into someone whose instincts leaned more toward empathy than ridicule. Lincoln came to recognize the evils of slavery, but he did not condemn Southerners for owning slaves. When Southerners complained that slavery was a difficult system to eliminate, he could appreciate this point. “I surely will not blame them,” he said, “for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly powers were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing situation.”
²⁷
When he considered the matter carefully and imagined what kind of Southerners that Northerners would be if they grew up in the South, he thought, “They are just what we would be in their situation.”
²⁸
And yet, he knew slavery was wrong, in part because he could imagine what being a slave was like. To people who argued that slavery was “a very good thing,” he noted that he had never come across someone eager to take advantage of the opportunity “by being a slave himself.”
²⁹

Lincoln was a complex man, and I do not want to make a saint out of him. My aim here is to suggest that, to the extent that he displayed traits that we admire, he was also broad in his understanding of the causes of other people's behavior. His instincts, like those of my boss, led him to take into account the situational constraints that can play a major role in explaining people's actions—which is at least one reason why he said things such as, “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”
³⁰
He was also capable of seeing depravity in others when fitting, but in his tendency to avoid the “fundamental attribution error,” he set a good example for us all.

The additional lesson here is that we are less likely to have
schadenfreude
dominate our reactions to another person's misfortune if we are able to
focus on the situational factors causing the misfortune. Rather than
schadenfreude
, the prevailing emotion should be empathy, as it was for Lincoln, by all accounts. It is no accident that Lincoln was able to pen these immortal lines from his second inaugural address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”
³¹

The scandal? There was no need to be driven away by a little scandal. It would have been painful, grotesque, but a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community.

—S
AUL
B
ELLOW
,
H
ERZOG
¹

[A]n apostle of peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in this newspaper at the top of which “Shocking Atrocity” stands printed in large capitals.

—W
ILLIAM
J
AMES
²