106 / Rotman Management Spring 2017
party, I will make certain inferences about your policy
preferences — and maybe even some of your life choices —
based on that knowledge. The third approach is to focus on
other peoples’ behaviour: By watching what you do and how
you act, I obtain a source of information about what is going
on in your mind. So, if I see you eating onion ice cream every
day, I will assume that you love it.
We don’t think about these tools much, but they are ex-
traordinarily helpful in guiding us in our daily lives. Without
realizing it, we use them in just about every social interac-
tion we ever have. The problem is, they also have a dark
side: Egocentrism can lead us to believe others see the world
more like we do than is actually the case; using stereotypes
leads us to assume that others are more different from us
than they actually are; and focusing on behaviour as a di-
rect guide to peoples’ thoughts overlooks the power of situ-
ational influences — which play a significant role in guiding
human behaviour.Most people like to believe that they are independent
thinkers with kind hearts; what is the harder truth?
In general, people have good intentions, but we are also
heavily influenced by situational influences and forces thatwe are not necessarily aware of — and that often leads us
to behave in ways that are inconsistent with our vision of
ourselves.
Imagine that you’re thinking about whether to cheat in
some situation. Most people use their good intentions as a
guide to how they ‘should’ behave; but when they are actu-
ally in the situation, their behaviour is influenced by forces
that they underestimate. In particular, we underappreciate
the power that other people have over us. Humans are very
social beings, so when we are around other people, we are
influenced by their attitudes and behaviour.If a person thinks she sees the world as it actually is,
what happens when she meets someone who sees the
world quite differently?
Stanford Psychologist Lee Ross has argued that we are all
‘naive realists’ in that we naively presume that we see the
world as it is. The inability to introspect on why we’re think-
ing or feeling as we are, means that our thoughts and feel-
ings seem like accurate reflections of the world. I like you
because you are a likeable person; that’s not something
about me, that’s something about you. I look at a table and
it’s brown; I can see it right there in front of me — it’s brown:
These don’t seem like constructions in my brain — they
seem like facts about the world.
What this means is, when somebody else looks at the
very same thing and sees something else — for instance,
if two people look at the same political candidate and you
think ‘she is fantastic’ but the other person thinks ‘that can-
didate is awful’ — you will think that anyone who disagrees
with you is mistaken in some way. ‘I see the world as it is, so
they are the ones who are biased or mistaken in their think-
ing’. This leads us to denigrate the minds of others, and to
think of other people as being less intelligent and reasonable
than we are.Egocentrism leads us to believe that others see
the world more like we do than is actually the case.If you think a candidate is awful, but someone else says
they are ‘terrific’, you believe they are mistaken.SHUTTERSTOCK