Design of Everyday Things [27]
Well, it was a coincidence. It turns out that the power supply to the terminal had burned out, a fact that had nothing to do with the computer program. Coincidence is enough to set the causal wheels rolling.
Earlier I suggested that people have a tendency to blame themselves for difficulties with technology. Actually, the point is a bit more complicated. People do tend to find causes for events, and just what they assign as the cause varies. In part people tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession. If I do some action A just prior to some result R, then I conclude that A must have caused R, even if, as in the example above, there really was no relationship between the two. The story is more complex when we intend an action to produce a desired result and fail, and there are problems when we have done the action through some intermediate mechanism.
Just where do we put the blame for failure? The answer is not clear. The psychology of blame (or, to be more accurate, of attribution) is complex and not fully understood. In part, there seems to have to be some perceived causal relationship between the thing being blamed and the result. The word perceived is critical: the causal relationship does not have to exist; the person simply has to think it is there. Sometimes we attribute the cause to things that had nothing to do with the action. And sometimes we ignore the real culprit.
One major aspect of the assignment of blame is that we frequently have little information on which to make the judgment, and what little we have may be wrong. As a result, blame or credit can be assessed almost independently of reality. Here is where the apparent simplicity of everyday objects causes problems. Suppose I try to use an everyday thing, but I can’t: Where is the fault, in my action or in the thing? We are apt to blame ourselves. If we believe that others are able to use the device and if we believe that it is not very complex, then we conclude that any difficulties must be our own fault. Suppose the fault really lies in the device, so that lots of people have the same problems. Because everyone perceives the fault to be his or her own, nobody wants to admit to having trouble. This creates a conspiracy of silence, maintaining the feelings of guilt and helplessness among users.
Interestingly enough, the common tendency to blame ourselves for failures with everyday objects goes against the normal attributions people make. In general, it has been found that people attribute their own problems to the environment, those of other people to their personalities.
Here is a made-up example. Consider Tom, the office terror. Today Tom got to work late, slammed the door to his office, and yelled at his colleagues. “Ah,” his colleagues and staff said, “there he goes again. He’s so excitable—always gets mad at the slightest thing.”
Now consider Tom’s point of view. “I really had a hard day,” Tom explains. “I woke up late because when my clock radio turned on, I tried to hit the snooze bar to give me five minutes’ more sleep; instead I reset the time so that I overslept for a whole hour. That wasn’t my fault—the radio’s badly designed. I didn’t even have time for my morning coffee. I couldn’t find a close parking spot because I was late. And then because I was in such a rush I dropped my papers all over the street and got them dirty. Then when I went to get a cup of coffee from the office machine, it was all out. None of this was my fault—I had a run of really bad events. Yes, I was a bit curt with my colleagues, but who wouldn’t be under the same circumstances? Surely they understand.”
But Tom’s colleagues see a different picture. They don’t have access to his inner thoughts or even to his morning’s activities. All they see is that Tom yelled at them simply because the office coffee machine was empty. And this reminds them