It sucks being the bad guy

Sometimes I have a really hard time thinking of things to write about on this blog, and other times it's really easy for me to come up with situations in my life that I can apply social psychology concepts to and write about. I was having a very hard time coming up with something to write about for this particular blog when the noise in my dorm suddenly gave me an idea for something that I could write about. To begin with, I need to explain the concept that I would like to talk about.

The writers of our textbook write that the cardinal lesson of social psychology is that situational contexts have a profound impact on a persons behavior (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). This means that peoples behavior can change from one situation to another. For example, a person who is very comfortable getting up and speaking or performing in front of a lot of people can be very uncomfortable in smaller, more personal settings. As social perceivers, we take cues from these situational factors when shaping our opinions about others. However, we often underestimate the role of situational factors on a person's behavior and overestimate the role of personal factors on a person's behavior when shaping our opinion of them. In other words, we tend to explain a person's behavior more by their personality rather than by their environment. The formal name for this is the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977).

I fear that I have fallen victim to the Fundamental Attribution Error several times throughout this year. It happens to me often because I am an RA and often have to tell people things that they don't want to hear, like to turn down their loud music or to stop having loud parties in their room at 2:00AM. To give a specific example, I will write about the relationship that I had with a couple of my residents. For the first semester I lived on the second floor of my building, and there were more than a few instances when I had to go up to the third floor to tell the guys that lived above me to turn town their music. These guys didn't just have normal loud music; they had a sub-woofer that shook my ceiling and drove me nuts.

Eventually, after I had already told them several times not to turn it up that loud, I went off on them and got pretty angry. After that they really didn't like me and I heard them talking to other people about me calling me a tool and other names that I don't wanna write here. For the second semester, though, I ended up having to move up to their floor to be the new RA on the third floor. My new room was right across the hall from them, and it was kinda awkward for a while when I would pass them in the hallway. However, after a while I started striking up conversations with them, and one of them ended up telling me that he really didn't like me before because of the few interactions that we had when I had to tell him and his roommate to turn their music down. He said that after getting to know me, though, he thought I was pretty cool. It was very good example of letting situational factors influence his opinion of me, when, in reality, I wasn't the tool that he thought I was. I don't blame him for forming the initial opinion of me that he did because I probably would have done the same thing had I been in his shoes. It mad me realize, though, that it really sucks to have to be the bad guy.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 174-221). New York: Academic Press.