Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [117]
THERE ARE NO CHINESE BILL BUCKNERS
Wisdom has a colloquial sense that we all readily understand. One recent psychological examination of wisdom described it, in part, as “excellence in judgment in matters of life combining personal and common good.”9 But research into the influences of how we make sense of the world gives us a better understanding of what makes somebody wise—as opposed to being smart, say, or knowledgeable. Wisdom properly understood is not about what we know—that’s just information. Nor does it have to do with intelligence in the sense of IQ or intellectual horsepower. At bottom, wisdom is a function of how we think.
Some 350 years ago, French philosopher René Descartes put forward a simple-sounding proposition: If I can perceive something clearly and distinctly, it must be true.10 But Descartes took for granted something that we now know isn’t true—that our own minds are an open book to us, and that we can discover, by looking inward, all the possible errors to which our minds are prone.
The reality, however, is more complicated than Descartes believed. Our thought processes are influenced by a variety of factors of which we are often not even aware. Some of the intriguing research on what psychologists call “thinking styles” has focused on how they differ across cultures. These cultural differences are not of direct concern to us here, but the research in this field has illuminated aspects of how we think that we might otherwise take for granted or not see at all.
Take the case of the dire-sounding “fundamental attribution error,” also known more mellifluously as the “overattribution effect.” This is the tendency to assign too much credit and blame for a situation to a specific individual, without taking into account the surrounding circumstances or environment. Think of our desire to identify the hero or the goat when our favorite team wins or loses, and to place the burden for the win or the loss on their shoulders alone. Poor Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman who allowed a weakly hit ground ball to roll between his legs in game six of the 1986 World Series, is a victim of the fundamental attribution error. A whole constellation of things had to go wrong for the Red Sox leading up to and after that play, but ask someone who Bill Buckner is, and they’ll likely tell you that he cost the Red Sox the World Series that year.
Psychologists once thought that the fundamental attribution error was, well, fundamental—a universal feature of how the mind works. But beginning in the 1980s, research revealed that it was, in fact, more of a cultural trait than a universal one.11 In the 1990s, a team of psychologists tackled the hero-goat problem directly by comparing how Chinese and American sportswriters explained the same events.12 What they found was that American sportswriters emphasized the actions of particular players in explaining the outcomes, while their Chinese counterparts focused on the context. Western thinking, in other words, tends to isolate actors and objects from their environments. In the East, however, context is king. Repeated studies have shown that East Asians are far less prone to the fundamental attribution error than Westerners are. This difference is the product of nurture, not nature, as people brought up outside their ancestral culture tend to adopt the characteristic thought patterns of the place in which they are raised. Chinese Americans, for example, fall in between the Chinese and the Americans of European descent. Studies of how mothers speak to their young children have uncovered an intriguing pattern: Mothers in Western countries tend to use mostly nouns in speaking to their babies, picking out objects and assigning words to them—“bottle,” “diaper,” “crib,” and so on. East Asian mothers, in contrast, tend to use more verbs, focusing a young child’s attention on the interactions between an object and its environment rather than on the object itself.13
Naturally, if these styles of thinking