What the Dog Saw [157]
This is a question that social psychologists have looked at closely. In the late 1920s, in a famous study, the psychologist Theodore Newcomb analyzed extroversion among adolescent boys at a summer camp. He found that how talkative a boy was in one setting — say, at lunch — was highly predictive of how talkative that boy would be in the same setting in the future. A boy who was curious at lunch on Monday was likely to be curious at lunch on Tuesday. But his behavior in one setting told you almost nothing about how he would behave in a different setting: from how someone behaved at lunch, you couldn’t predict how he would behave during, say, afternoon playtime. In a more recent study, of conscientiousness among students at Carleton College, the researchers Walter Mischel, Neil Lutsky, and Philip K. Peake showed that how neat a student’s assignments were or how punctual he was told you almost nothing about how often he attended class or how neat his room or his personal appearance was. How we behave at any one time, evidently, has less to do with some immutable inner compass than with the particulars of our situation.
This conclusion, obviously, is at odds with our intuition. Most of the time, we assume that people display the same character traits in different situations. We habitually underestimate the large role that context plays in people’s behavior. In the Newcomb summer-camp experiment, for example, the results showing how little consistency there was from one setting to another in talkativeness, curiosity, and gregariousness were tabulated from observations made and recorded by camp counselors on the spot. But when, at the end of the summer, those same counselors were asked to give their final impressions of the kids, they remembered the children’s behavior as being highly consistent.
“The basis of the illusion is that we are somehow confident that we are getting what is there, that we are able to read off a person’s disposition,” Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, says. “When you have an interview with someone and have an hour with them, you don’t conceptualize that as taking a sample of a person’s behavior, let alone a possibly biased sample, which is what it is. What you think is that you are seeing a hologram, a small and fuzzy image but still the whole person.”
Then Nisbett mentioned his frequent collaborator, Lee Ross, who teaches psychology at Stanford. “There was one term when he was teaching statistics and one term when he was teaching a course with a lot of humanistic psychology. He gets his teacher evaluations. The first referred to him as cold, rigid, remote, finicky, and uptight. And the second described this wonderful warmhearted guy who was so deeply concerned with questions of community and getting students to grow. It was Jekyll and Hyde. In both cases, the students thought they were seeing the real Lee Ross.”
Psychologists call this tendency — to fixate on supposedly stable character traits and overlook the influence of context — the Fundamental Attribution Error, and if you combine this error with what we know about snap judgments, the interview becomes an even more problematic encounter. Not only had I let my first impressions color the information I gathered about Myers, but I had also assumed that the way he behaved with me in an interview setting was indicative of the way he would always behave. It isn’t that the interview is useless; what I learned about Myers — that he and I get along well — is something I could never have gotten from a résumé or by talking to his references. It’s just that our conversation turns out to have been less useful, and potentially more misleading, than I had supposed. That most basic of human rituals — the conversation with a stranger — turns out to be a minefield.
4.
Not long after I met with Nolan Myers, I talked with a human-resources