Correcting the Fundamental Attribution Error

It turns out that we’ve all made a critical error. And not just any error, but a fundamental attribution error. If it sounds terrifying, well, that may be only slightly off the mark.

I read about this error in Richard Nisbett’s book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking  in which he describes “scientific and philosophical concepts that can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world.” It turns out that we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.

Our problem is that we tend to attribute other people’s successes and failures to personal dispositions while we discount the context or circumstances that may have contributed to them. For instance, we might think of Todd as a lazy student, or of our co-worker Susan as standoffish and rude, or of Bill Gates as incredibly brilliant. We don’t take into account the circumstances that may have led to our perceptions. Nisbett digs into the Bill Gates story to reveal that when he was an 8^th grader his parents transferred him to a different school because he was bored. His new school happened to be one of the very few schools in 1968 that was connected to a mainframe computer. This lucky break meant that he was able to log time on the computer and even test software for a local company. From there he began sneaking out of the house at 3am to spend time at the University of Washington computer center. If Gates had not transferred schools at that critical time, would he have become who he is today?

Nisbett states, 

“Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about” (p. 35). 

We tend to assume it was the person’s characteristics rather than the surrounding circumstances that made them succeed or struggle.

The kicker is that we do the opposite with ourselves – we, having the luxury of an intimate knowledge of our own circumstances, tend to give ourselves a break when we experience failure. We attribute our problem not to a personal traits, but to the situation. “Well, I would have gotten that job if I had not gotten a cold – I just wasn’t at the top of my game” or “The teacher doesn’t like me” or “The requirements aren’t fair.”

The truth is, contexts and situations have a great deal to do with our behaviors. While we tend to think other people behave the way they do because of some innate characteristic (e.g. laziness, brilliance, greed) the reality is that life is a series of circumstances that make us into the people we currently are.

This Fundamental Attribution Error has huge implications for teachers when we think about how we approach students, parents, and even our fellow teachers. I’ve been guilty of thinking Parent A “just doesn’t care” about their child’s needs in school, or that Teacher X just has a chip on her shoulder, or that my administrator is rude. But if it were me in those exact same circumstances I would cut myself a break by understanding how the current situation is making me appear as if I don’t have time for my child or that I’m too busy to socialize and be friendly with my co-workers or that my fracturing marriage is spilling over into negative interactions at work.  

The bottom line is that we need to give each other a break. It can be hard to catch yourself doing this but, fittingly, it’s easier to catch someone else in the midst of committing the Fundamental Attribution Error. Once you begin to see it in others, you can notice it in yourself.

Does this strike a chord for you? Do you notice yourself doing this with others? Have you discovered ways to catch yourself in the act of judging others and halt the judgment? Share in the comments below.

We're Never Using Scissors Again...

The other day I was working with a group of Kindergarten teachers, otherwise known as the saints of the teaching world, when a second-year teacher gave me some words of wisdom that I think God intended me to hear. She lamented that the first time she tried to have her students use scissors it was a disaster. So much so that she went home and told her mom, a retired Kindergarten teacher, that they were never using scissors again. Ever.

Her mom gave her some advice, which has been reverberating through my mind ever since: The first time you do ANYTHING with Kindergarteners, it’s a disaster. Just expect it. And know that it will get better the more you do it.

I think that advice may not be just for Kindergarteners. It may apply to any person, or group of people, no matter their size.

I think about the first time I tried to ride a Razor scooter – I’m lucky I didn’t end up at Urgent Care with a tree-shaped dent in my forehead. Or the first time I modeled a lesson in front of a teacher – the lesson went too long, I hadn’t planned out EXACTLY what to say during the think aloud, and the kids left the lesson confused and befuddled.

I brought up this scissors story to a different group of teachers during a lesson study in which we decided to try revision stations from Kate Messner’s Real Revision . We planned each station, prepared the materials, and tried to anticipate students’ confusions. But the teachers were still worried that it wouldn’t work. Well, guess what? The first time, it probably won’t! It might even turn out to be a complete Kindergarten-Scissors disaster. But that doesn’t mean there’s not value in the attempt.

If we gave ourselves room to have a nuclear-meltdown disaster every time we tried something new, and just expected it to not go well, then I’m guessing we might be pleasantly surprised at least half the time. And that’s a WAY better feeling than the anxiety and frustration that comes with expecting perfection and not getting it.

Some might think this is a pessimistic way to look at things, but I actually think it’s the opposite. It’s giving yourself permission to flop at something the first few times you try it, to expect it to be less than perfect. And to be optimistic that it will improve a little, with every future attempt.

Expecting disaster could make us more daring and willing to try a new strategy. And in the process we might end up being kinder to ourselves.

Which Matters More -- Type or Amount of Scaffolding?

When reading with a student, which matters more – the amount of support you give the child when they encounter a difficult word, or the type of support you give?

The answer might surprise you. In an article in the March/April issue of The Reading Teacher, Emily Rodgers describes her study of 10 Reading Recovery teachers and the level and type of scaffolding they provided students as they read. They separated the teachers into two groups – teachers who tended to have results above the national average for Reading Recovery and teachers who tended to have results below the national average.  To assess the level of support they evaluated teachers’ use of Wood’s (2003) tutoring rule: “When the learner runs into difficulty, the teacher should increase the amount of help provided, and when the learner experiences, success, the teacher should decrease the amount of help” (Rodgers, 2017, p. 527).  Rodgers found that there was no significant difference between the two groups of teachers. All teachers adjusted the level of their instruction appropriately about 61% of the time.

Rodgers did, however, find a very significant difference between the two groups of teachers regarding type of support they provided. Students (and all readers, for that matter) use three cueing systems as they read: meaning, structure, and visual cues . Proficient readers simultaneously use multiple cues, while struggling readers tend to overuse one or two cues, often due to the instruction they’ve received (Schwartz, 2005).

Rodgers found that high-performing teachers were eight times more likely to intentionally vary the type of support they gave in response to students by prompting them to use the missing cueing system. In other words, if a student over-relied on meaning cues (by misreading pony for horse or swing for playground) then these teachers prompted them to use more visual cues. If the reader overused visual cues (by saying visually similar nonsense words such as payund for playground, for instance) then the teachers prompted them to attend to meaning. This attention to the readers’ MSV errors and intentionality about their teaching response resulted in much higher success for students.

It seems simple, right? Simply notice what the student is not doing, and prompt them to do it. But Rodgers cautions that we tend to find our “favorite” prompts and reuse them over and over again without regard to the child in front of us.

She also cautions that just because there wasn’t a significant difference between the amount of support provided by the two groups of teachers doesn’t mean that we should stop adjusting how much support we give. All students in the study made some progress, and that could have been due to the teachers’ varying amount of support. Of course, if we don’t vary how much support we give, we will likely cause frustration in the student, which can be detrimental.

I found this interesting, because I’ve written before  about amount and type of teacher scaffolding, but this study forwards the notion that tailoring our prompts for students to the quality of their miscues is by far the more important to attend to.

What about you? Does this change your thoughts about how you confer with your students? Or how you work with small groups of students? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.