We discuss real examples of fundamental attribution error inside and outside of the workplace. Then it's on to risk normalization - is it something we can change?
(Transcript Start)
[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name.
[00:00:06] spk_0: What a dumb name. It's so stupid.
[00:00:22] spk_1: So, last week,
[00:00:23] spk_0: last week, on the previous
[00:00:26] spk_1: episode of
[00:00:28] spk_0: cast
[00:00:29] spk_1: with no name, we talked about fundamental attribution error and we gave homework, which was to, uh, think about when this applies to your personal or professional life. And then come up with three reasons why you're staring at me so intently and I'm terrified. Uh, three reasons why the, uh, person doing a behavior that you would deem as quote unquote, unacceptable, crazy. Yeah, that could possibly be rational with their local rationale as to why they might have done it. We gave the example of you, you've been cut off and sometimes you cut someone off and how those, when you do it, you are able to rationalize it. But when someone else does it, you're like this person
[00:01:17] spk_0: is. What type of cutting off are you talking about? What
[00:01:20] spk_1: are cutting off?
[00:01:22] spk_0: I have a three year old that really enjoys using scissors. So there's a lot of options
[00:01:26] spk_1: as to what I've seen her scissors, they just plastic and impossible to cut anything with. So, yeah, I'm not worried about cutting off anything. That's where we, we left, we left it with that homework and then you being the A plus student and maybe, I mean, we're not gonna get my grade but it is not a um, you did the homework.
[00:01:49] spk_0: I did do the homework.
[00:01:50] spk_1: Of course you did and you're so proud of it and you wrote it in my face as soon as you got here. Um But let's hear
[00:01:57] spk_0: it to be, to be fair. I don't know that I did the homework. Well, but I did the homework. We're going to
[00:02:02] spk_1: find out.
[00:02:04] spk_0: All right. So here is the situation. Um I got to my daughter's daycare and I was one of several parents who got a firm talking to and I got a firm talking to because apparently there has been a pattern of parents not paying weekly on time. This is a small home run day care. So you can understand why it would be incredibly important to pay the day care provider on time.
[00:02:40] spk_1: Yes. And it's, it's small.
[00:02:41] spk_0: It's small. So it's like six Children.
[00:02:44] spk_1: Yeah, not like a small chain of day care, like a
[00:02:48] spk_0: one person home day care. So I got talking to because um I'm part of the problem and we do that and I realized that I was aggressively judging her for being angry with me. And then this is where it gets real meta. It gets, it gets meta because I don't even know if I'm using that word properly. I don't have no
[00:03:17] spk_1: idea. Any relatively recent pop culture word you're going to
[00:03:21] spk_0: butcher. Um, that I was judging her for having fundamental attribution error because she was judging all of us for making an error.
[00:03:38] spk_1: I'm trying to decide if you get credit for your own work if that's the way it started because it's so, yeah, you were, say that again. You were judging.
[00:03:48] spk_0: I was judging her. I was
[00:03:50] spk_1: falling into the thing that we're asking everyone else to catch themselves doing
[00:03:56] spk_0: that. She wasn't doing her homework.
[00:03:59] spk_1: Anyone who listened to the last episode and didn't do your homework. Andrea's shaking her fist at you and deeply judging
[00:04:09] spk_0: you. Yeah. So I was, I was thinking while she was talking to me of like, well, how, how dare you be so angry at these people don't, you know, they're trying their hardest. And part of the reason there's a couple of systems level reasons why people forget. There's no option to prepay, there's no option to do anything like on auto pay. And so each parent every week has to remember to Venmo every week. And so people are pretty good at it, but every once in a while, especially if there's like a vacation or something mixed in, it seems to be a pattern of kind of, everybody forgets on the same week and there's no reminder process and despite having an alarm and a calendar notification in my own world, I still forget one set of probably every 10 or so weeks. I forget, I, I only forget like 24 hours. Like I realize it the next day,
[00:05:07] spk_1: which is pretty good because I am, I am like a 50 50 on taking out the garbage. So your memory is serving you pretty well.
[00:05:16] spk_0: So I realized in that moment that I was being very judgmental of her being judgmental. And I thought, man, you, you think you're good at this Andrea, but you're just, you just push the judgment around. So I'm, I'm no, no better than any sort of human person trying to do this
[00:05:34] spk_1: human person. OK?
[00:05:36] spk_0: I mean, there might be another, I don't know, it's maybe a robot would be far better at it but,
[00:05:42] spk_1: but it would be neither a human nor a person. So yeah, I, I sure you know what a robot would be better.
[00:05:50] spk_0: Um But I did, I did stop and recognize how very important it was in that moment in time for her to be paid. And that if I was in a similar situation of, you know, that was my living and I didn't know consistently when I was going to be paid and I had bills to pay and I had a certain amount of time that I had to wait for stuff to be transferred to Venmo to my account to do it and I, that I would be extremely frustrated and that it would seem very, very simple for these people to just remember to pay me because why wouldn't they think it was important enough? So I had a moment of reflection in the span of about 15 seconds in this conversation. And then, and then I suggested a bunch of system level fixes for this not to be a problem. So
[00:06:42] spk_1: first we'll start with the fixes. What were the, what were the fixes you suggested?
[00:06:46] spk_0: So I offered to do some research to allow her to have a method of auto pay.
[00:06:52] spk_1: So Andrea to say I'll, I'll do it, I'll
[00:06:56] spk_0: do it for you. She's not, you know, like technology isn't quite her friend. And so the idea of doing that, I think historically has been very scary. So having somebody help her
[00:07:07] spk_1: terrible. I, I imagine this gonna be on my calendar. And I'm like, hey, could you help me? It's a separate, don't ask any further questions, but can you help me figure out how I'm able to get this situation set up?
[00:07:20] spk_0: Yeah. So we have a calendar meeting notice for next Monday. Um So that was, that was suggestion one. And then suggestion two is uh well, I I suggested a possibility of doing prepayment. She doesn't really like that option. So then I realized that I was suggesting things without learning from her. So I asked her what her needs were and she needs to be paid every week for bookkeeping, the amount that she's due that week. Um, and it needs to be, uh, obviously consistent on the same day. And her solution was actually to fine people. So she was gonna do a $25 per day fine for any time you relate. And so the question that I asked her is, would the fine fix the problem for her? Like, would she, is the extra money going to correct for the fact that she doesn't have what she thought she needed in the bank account on Friday. And she said, absolutely not. She's just hoping it was going to be a deterrent. And then she told me a story about how historically, when she's had to do this years ago, there were most people would just pay the fine and they would still forget to do it that tracks you. So I suggested that maybe the deterrent wasn't going to be as effective as she would hope for because people weren't intending to forget to begin with. And so the deterrent itself wasn't going to allow them to remember more. And so first suggestion, automatic scared her a little bit. And then I said, well, what if I just wrote you a stack of checks? Like one for each week? I don't even know if this is legal. By the way, we're throwing, we're flinging this out into the world. But what if I wrote you a stack of checks one for each week and you could deposit them on Friday, but I could give you several months worth at a time. And she loved that solution.
[00:09:16] spk_1: Loved it. And now that's what you're doing is what
[00:09:19] spk_0: I'm doing. I gave her, I gave her the stack of checks today.
[00:09:23] spk_1: What was the response did you say? Wow. I had such a great idea. This is, I'm
[00:09:29] spk_0: still ahead of the game. Her, um, her response was, that's a really good question more. It wasn't like a grateful response. It was a, I'm glad you figured out how to do the thing. You were supposed to already know how to figure out how to do. Right. So, it was, she was, she's still deep heart and a fundamental attribution. Er, but actually the, the, the funniest part of the conversation that we were having when she was very frustrated with me and telling me how terrible it was that none of the parents seem to be able to pay on time and she'd say I'm, I'm so busy. She was saying I'm so busy that I actually don't have time to check to see whether or not I've been paid and I just kept thinking if you don't have time to see whether or not you're paid, surely you can understand that probably the parents who are not paying are feeling the same way about trying to struggle to remember to put that as a weekly thing that they have to do
[00:10:34] spk_1: and also the barried entry to pay. I mean, it's not super high, Venmo is not high but to remember to pay, it's just the,
[00:10:43] spk_0: it's the weekly remote because everything else is automated anyway. So that was, that was, that was my
[00:10:49] spk_1: homework. So you solve, the small businesses need to get paid and they were extremely grateful. That's not at all. But they were, they come around. Um, ok, so we, you did the homework. I'm still getting over driving and fundamental attribution error. Because every time I step in the car, I have six or so instances where I have to be like, hey, Matt, I'm sure that it means to do that and put your middle finger down like that's not what you want to be doing. You grew up,
[00:11:21] spk_0: you grew up though with sort of like angry drivers teaching you how to drive. Yeah. So this
[00:11:26] spk_1: is pretty angry, angry, uh, examples to follow. And again, it was, you know, parents were from Brooklyn and Queens and I was back there two weeks ago, driving again and for the first hour or so that I was back there. I was absolutely terrified. I couldn't believe, believe that I had driven for 11 years in Queens and hadn't been in an accident because I crossed over the bridge and I swear the clouds got a little darker and everything was just mad max styles I'm going through and I didn't remember it being like that. And then, you know, the next day there I felt back to normal but it was a
[00:12:14] spk_0: big topic
[00:12:15] spk_1: here. No, but then I, I get mad at myself because now I don't get to be mad anymore because then I have to rationalize it because we spend all of our time talking about this stuff.
[00:12:25] spk_0: Well, I can tell you the way that I fixed it is exactly what I just did in my homework. You can't be mad at people for taking actions anymore. Driving. I mean, you can be, you are but then you just, you, you be mad at them for them being mad at other people. I was still mad at people. It's just a different type of math.
[00:12:47] spk_1: I don't think it'll ever go away. I'm trying, I'm trying. I do really well professionally but oh man, something about just getting in the car, just all these muscle memory, emotional memory of being like no one is good at driving and you need to let them know so they can improve.
[00:13:08] spk_0: You brought up a big topic though. Risk
[00:13:11] spk_1: normalization. Yeah, I'm sure you want to, I could see,
[00:13:16] spk_0: can you see it in my eyes?
[00:13:17] spk_1: You, you are at
[00:13:20] spk_0: the bit talking about risk normalization.
[00:13:22] spk_1: Let's do it. Should we? I mean, we're here, we're approaching the subject. We didn't have exactly the best plan as what was gonna happen next anyway. So let's go.
[00:13:34] spk_0: All right. So risk normalization. Let's back up for a second because I think in our work worlds, there has been quite a bit of conversation for many years about the idea that people have different risk tolerances so much so that there's, there's like companies that you can hire that profile people when, when you're bringing new folks into your organization to try to like, assess their risk tolerance, which sounds really cool on paper
[00:14:09] spk_1: to wait quickly in 30 seconds or less. And we have a clock right here. They are recording, just describe what that's like to have someone come in and profile like, what does that look like?
[00:14:21] spk_0: What is it a lot of the time? It's, it's like a series of questions or a form that people fill out that is supposed to put them in, into a category of whether or not they are a risky person, someone who's willing to tolerate risk or whether or not they are a more um cautious individual with the thought process that you would probably only want to hire cautious individuals.
[00:14:48] spk_1: This sounds like ad E I nightmare from my software startup world. That does not sound ok. But let's, let's continue. Let's not, let me detract. Yeah.
[00:15:00] spk_0: And, and so what always struck me as interesting about that is one, the recognition that your risk tolerance of something is very dependent upon your experience level. And so somebody who might be a super cautious individual, right? And then you might get that information about whether somebody is cautious by, like, kind of what their hobbies are and what they tend to like to do outside of work, is it things that are, you know, types of activities that would not lend themselves to people being injured, like, or like knitting versus white water kayaking? Right. So, like, you might qualify somebody as a more cautious person if they're kayaking, nail it. But any individual who to in involves themselves in any sort of activity gets risk normalized over time. So maybe you didn't start off as a whitewater kayaker. You started off as like a lake kayaker and then a sea kayaker and then a rough seas kayaker. And then you decided to go down a river that had, you know, class rapids that were easy for you to be able to work. And then the more experience you got, you got higher and higher class rapids until now suddenly you have quite a bit of expertise in kayaking and it doesn't seem nearly as scary to you as it did when you started.
[00:16:27] spk_1: So all those specific examples and now I know if you've been kayaking and how aggressively do you kayak?
[00:16:36] spk_0: Um I have kayaked. I rough seas is my, my limitation at this point. I've peaked at sea.
[00:16:45] spk_1: But did you peak because you thought anything further or more difficult would be too
[00:16:51] spk_0: risky. I just, I just had Children and ran out of time.
[00:16:54] spk_1: Well, now I feel bad saying lazy, but I'm sticking with it.
[00:16:59] spk_0: Um, and so if we're looking for somebody, so, so there's no, there's no argument that some, some people, right? So, like you're, what makes you, you and how you were raised, right? There are personality types that are a little bit more cautious than others, but many of the jobs that we are hiring for the work itself is inherently dangerous. And so you actually need folks who are willing to engage in that work. If you're like, if you're a lineman, right, you're up in the air working with volt, I mean, you just like the possibilities of being seriously injured exist in your job world. And yet somehow we're kind of get this idea that you could get a cautious person to be engaged in an activity that has high risk to it and that the risk normalization of the person who's doing that work all the time. We kind of think should look the same as somebody who's in an office who doesn't do that work all the time. And that to me just, there's like a massive thought process disconnect in that idea of people's risk tolerance is being the same for a specific activity in definitely
[00:18:09] spk_1: in, I do this 100 times. I have the same risk challenges the first time, 10,000 times and I still have the same risk tolerance,
[00:18:16] spk_0: right? So that's just not how life works, right? That's not how our brains work. That's not how we categorize risk to begin with. But so not only one person having the same risk tolerance indefinitely, but thinking that the risk tolerance of the human who is in an office and not doing that work is quote unquote the right way to look at it versus the risk tolerance of the person who is doing that work day in and day out and has been normalized to it is quote unquote the wrong way of doing it. That that's a massive disconnect in my mind. And usually the person who is in the office is the one that's making the rules through their risk taking lens right through their risk tolerance lens. And then the person who's out in the field who has tons of experience doing what they're doing, uh, it doesn't make sense to them. Stupid example that doesn't involve, you know, work that some of us might not be familiar with. It would be like me telling you, Matt that tomorrow when you're in your kitchen, I need you to wear cut resistant gloves while you're preparing dinner. If you're cutting things, you'd be like, huh? Yeah, I mean, I understand conceptually the risk that you're trying to prevent here that I'm not doing it. But, but yeah, but it wouldn't make any sense to you. You'd be like, yeah, I know I can get cut, like, I'm not not aware of that and you've
[00:19:47] spk_1: been cut. I mean, I cook pretty often. I've been cut plenty of times. Right.
[00:19:51] spk_0: And so that's just because you've been in the kitchen a bunch cutting things and if I've never done that before, then it would just seem to make total sense, total sense. Like, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you put on cut resistant gloves? But from your perspective, you'd be like, it doesn't make total sense to me. Why doesn't it make sense to me?
[00:20:11] spk_1: That doesn't, I mean, I was also thinking about like if you asked me to wear an entire suit that was flame retardant. If I was gonna go use the oven, like the same concept as it, it sounds like looney tunes and it was never happened. I would just not use the oven anymore. I go cook somewhere. I go to the grill. If you didn't make me use
[00:20:33] spk_0: the No, no, you absolutely need the flame retardant suit for the grill
[00:20:36] spk_1: ma All right. Well, I'm ordering every day, which is dangerously close to how it was when we first moved
[00:20:42] spk_0: in. Yeah. So anyway, so risk normalization is something that naturally happens, the more you have experience and the idea of having people have the same risk normalization that are in an office environment, oftentimes the folks that are making rules versus the person out in the field that's never gonna happen. And so when we're thinking about what is realistic and has operational fidelity, meaning it makes sense to the people who have to do the work in real life. We should be seeking to understand their feelings and thoughts about the risk that they're in. Because if we come at it from this completely different angle of, hey, I think cut resistant gloves in the condition are a really good idea. And we just kind of continually push that we're gonna be really disappointed when people don't think it's a good idea.
[00:21:37] spk_1: So risk normalization. What's the homework? What's, what's the thing we can go and do in our personal lives that would really show, hey, this, maybe I'm, I'm normalize. Maybe I view this as particularly risky. People do it all the time. How can we put our brains to work to see this outside of the workplace?
[00:22:04] spk_0: That's a great question. Risk normalization is so hard to see when you're in it. So we're gonna have to be thinking about observing someone else or maybe we can think about our past. All right. So let's do this. Let's try to think about something that we do work wise or personal wise. That when we originally started doing it, it was terrifying to us. And now it doesn't feel like a big deal
[00:22:36] spk_1: driving in Queens. Got mine done already. Ok. Um So that's the homework and we'll talk about it next time.
[00:22:57] spk_0: Well, that's
[00:22:59] spk_1: it. Yeah, another one in the books we did it.
[00:23:04] spk_0: If you, uh, want to send us any of your thoughts, actually. Fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website W W W dot hop podcast dot com.
[00:23:16] spk_1: That's H O P P O DC A S T dot com. It's still
[00:23:23] spk_0: such a stupid name.
[00:23:24] spk_1: We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.