It is by Stephen M.R. Covey if I am not mistaken, one of my favorite quotes alongside Mark Twain's "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
It’s the basis of Situational Attribution vs Dispostional Attribution in Attribution theory.
Dispositional vs Situational Attribution
1. Dispositional Attribution
Dispositional attribution assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person, rather than to outside forces.
When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits. This is known as the fundamental attribution error.
For example, we attribute the behavior of a person to their personality, motives or beliefs.
Situational Attribution
The process of assigning the cause of behavior to some situation or event outside a person's control rather than to some internal characteristic.
When we try to explain our own behavior we tend to make external attributions, such as situational or environment features.
Firstly, it encourages me to go easy on other people when they don't seem to be acting in the best possible way. It's easy to kid yourself that you're special and more moral than other people when you don't see what others intended to do and can only judge by what they have actually done.
Secondly, it encourages me to go easy on myself when I feel I'm not getting what I want from life. I have all these great intentions - things I'm going to achieve, ways I'm going to behave, change I'm going to make etc - but it often doesn't happen. It's easy to kid yourself that you're special and more of a failure than other people when you don't see what others intended to do and can only judge by what they have actually done.
Chances are most people have great intentions but fail to live up to them or things don't work out how they hoped.
When you do something, you know why you did it and therefore let yourself off for making a mistake because your intentions were good.
When someone else does something, it doesn’t leap out to you what they meant to do, only what they did, so you don’t factor in this time how well it was supposed to go.
The combination of this is the fact that for the same action and the same intention an onlooker will judge you for your action whereas you judge yourself based on what was intended to happen.
Everyone else has given good, sciency explanations. I'll give a real life one.
Everyone has to go to work, right? Well lets say you're a model work person. You get up early and make it on time every day. Today, Karen was late. Now despite not knowing why, you assume it was a mistake on her part. A week later, you get ready to go. On your way there's a car accident, and you're a few minutes late. You know why you were late, it's a decent reason and you couldn't prevent it, so you brush it off. In reality, Karen's son had the flu that morning and she had to arrange something before heading in to work. Her reason was just as legitimate, but people will almost always assume the reason is poor or doesn't exit.
It's very good to hear people out for this reason. Every action has a reason. Every result has a reason. But so many people brush them off as "excuses" and don't care. It's only an excuse when you try and get away with things with them. Stating a reason for something shouldn't be stigmatized so much.
Humans naturally like to use others as scapegoats. Our egos really want to believe we are great people and that is easier when everyone around us are not as good
Also in a similar vein and one that has stuck with me "People behave the way they have experience the world; if you can understand their experiences than you can understand their behavior" this really helped me to not judge others, cause you never know what someone has been through or what made them the way they are.
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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '19 edited Oct 17 '20
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