Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [108]
Our society can be quick to make wealthy people into heroes and poor ones into goats. That’s why the real estate mogul Donald Trump, whose Plaza Hotel went bankrupt and whose casino empire went bankrupt twice (a shareholder who invested $10,000 in his casino company in 1994 would thirteen years later have come away with $636),13 nevertheless dared to star in a wildly successful television program in which he judged the business acumen of aspiring young people.
Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a person’s potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions.
On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are. If people underestimate the role of chance in the careers of moguls, do they also downplay its role in the lives of the least successful? In the 1960s that question inspired the social psychologist Melvin Lerner to look into society’s negative attitudes toward the poor.14 Realizing that “few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,”15 Lerner concluded that “for the sake of their own sanity,” people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success.16 We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.
WE MIGHT NOT THINK we judge people according to their income or outward signs of success, but even when we know for a fact that a person’s salary is completely random, many people cannot avoid making the intuitive judgment that salary is correlated with worth. Melvin Lerner examined that issue by arranging for subjects to sit in a small darkened auditorium facing a one-way mirror.17 From their seats these observers could gaze into a small well-lit room containing a table and two chairs. The observers were led to believe that two workers, Tom and Bill, would soon enter the room and work together for fifteen minutes unscrambling anagrams. The curtains in front of the viewing window were then closed, and Lerner told the observers that he would keep the curtains shut because the experiment would go better if they could hear but not see the workers, so that they would not be influenced by their appearance. He also told them that because his funds were limited, he could pay only one of the workers, who would be chosen at random. As Lerner left the room, an assistant threw a switch that began to play an audiotape. The observers believed they were listening in as Tom and Bill entered the room behind the curtain and began their work. Actually they were listening to a recording of Tom and Bill reading a fixed script, which had been constructed such that, by various objective measures, each of them appeared to be equally adept and successful at his task. Afterward the observers, not knowing this, were asked to rate Tom and Bill on their effort, creativity, and success. When Tom was selected