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One of my favorite Twitter accounts, @visakanv recently advised his followers to fill in the blank: "Why doesn't everyone just... _______." Whatever comes up is often a clue about something you might be uncommonly well-suited to do.
My answer: “Why doesn’t everyone just work to cultivate more curiosity?” I’ve tried being certain. Did it very hard for a long time. The results are better when I cultivate curiosity. This applies to my personal relationships as much to my relationship with the wider world. I think radical curiosity requires becoming more afraid of being statically wrong than being uncertain.
Then I saw another tweet about how people who are used to feeling no agency in their personal lives (due to conditioning in bad relationships, for example) project that onto their politics and see the world as more unchangeable and depressing than it is. In this way, therapy can be part of a political reawakening.
This reminded me of research showing that people consistently attribute too much agency to other people and too little to themselves. This is a cognitive bias sometimes referred to as fundamental attribution error.
Cognitive biases and behavioral economics are super fascinating to me. And they’re very much part of my journey towards radical curiosity. My life got 1000x more interesting when I began trying to radically accept that there is nothing I can’t be wrong about. So I’m obviously very curious about the ways in which most people are consistently wrong.
Understanding and correcting for fundamental attribution error, to me, means that however much agency you assume others have, reduce it by 90%, and however much agency you assume you have, increase it by 90%.
Assume you are responsible for the vast majority of how your life is going and others are mainly victims of circumstance. Not because it’s true but because your brain is so wrong that you need to vastly overcorrect for your own bias.
The other reason to do this is that believing in your own agency yields good results but attributing too much agency to others leads to complacency and victim-blaming. Our brains do this to absolve ourselves of responsibility, shore up our ego, and take the lazy route.
But, as @r2g2 pointed out, successful people often believe their success results solely from their amazing brilliance and hard work and others’ failure results soley from their choices as well.
Which is why I think that while you should assume a lot of agency in how your life is going, there’s one exception. You should also assume you benefit and have always benefited from structural advantages way more and more often than you could possibly be consciously aware of.
Of course you’ll generally notice where you’re explicitly advantaged over others. But most of us are mostly unaware of the ways others are disadvantaged relative to us. Others’ disadvantages mostly only become obvious when pointed out.
Almost no one is going to say “Your whiteness helped you get hired at our firm.” The reality is hiring managers measurably, reliably prefer applicants with white-sounding names. One newer study indicates this may have more to do with socioeconomic status than race, or that more hiring managers realize Lakisha and Jamal are more likely to be Black than Chloe Jefferson and Ryan Washington.
Either way, from medical racism and misogyny to police racism to workplace misogyny, structural disadvantages definitely exist.
And there’s no way for those who are exempt to know about these disadvantages except to listen to people who point this reality out.
This is the central insight of the “privilege” concept. And it’s all “check your privilege” means. It means: Consider the reality that you benefit from being exempt from certain structural disadvantages other people face and by dent of that exception are mostly unaware of the myriad ways this exemption advantages you.
Obviously this relates to the problems facing native-born US men. But it’s also much bigger than that. It’s a problem that faces everyone, to some extent. For men particularly, and native-born white men especially, they’re caught between being told they have tremendous structural advantages yet feeling like they can’t catch a break.
I think one solution to this problem is to acknowledge both/and. Yes, in many arenas in American life, being born white and male does confer some structural advantage. That is, since racism and misogyny still exist in America, all else equal, white men are at an advantage anywhere racism and misogyny impact outcomes. I think native-born men would have a better time if they recognized this reality. Victim-mentality isn’t super useful for flourishing. And recognizing structural racism and sexism could, at least to some extent, replace grievance politics with a much-needed sense of purpose. I think it would be lovely for more native-born men to pursue justice for the marginalized rather than mistakenly wallow in a false sense of victimhood.
And, being born white and male confers way less structural advantage today than it did in the past. Furthermore, life in many ways is measurably harder for everyone in the bottom half, regardless of race or gender.
Again, it would be fantastic for native-born men to recognize the ways society is set up to transfer wealth and opportunity upwards. It only benefits those at the top for men to believe women, immigrants, and non-whites are their real enemies.
Putting the "fun" in fundamental attribution error