No one who actually knew the president ever quite understood Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of him as a genial dolt who stumbled over doorsteps. … Even the slightest misstep was taken as more proof that this graceful and athletic man, who had played on two national championship football teams at the University of Michigan and turned down offers from the pros, was, in fact, a bumbler.
—JAMES A. BAKER III1
“He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her.” And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
—JOHN 8:3–112
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
—NICK CARRAWAY, THE GREAT GATSBY3
One of my first bosses left a lasting impression on me. I helped him manage a group of high school student employees at the movie theater I mentioned in Chapter 5. Much of these kids’ banter was at each other’s expense. Mistakes inspired ribbing, sometimes ridicule. This was mostly how they entertained themselves between shows and after the concession rush. But they did not behave this way around my boss. When he emerged from the manager’s office to make his rounds, gather the cash, check the Coke syrup, examine the ice chests, they would rein it in. It was not because they feared him. They respected him, as did I.
The source of our respect was something indistinct at first. It was not his physical presence. He was slight of build and had a pallor that caused him to blend into the surroundings. But he made wise decisions under pressure. Movie theaters usually run smoothly, but they are also only one broken projector away from a frustrated public wanting its money back. And sometimes boorish customers cause problems. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, my boss kept his head when everyone about him was losing theirs, even accepting blame for problems if this resolved the issue nicely.4 But what really set him apart—and produced a kind of awe in me—was that I never once saw him either criticize or make fun of another person. He liked listening to jokes and saw the humor in people’s behavior, but he left criticism to others and recoiled from unkind laughter.
It took a while for me to appreciate these things about him. I would watch him closely, wondering if he would deviate from the pattern. He never did. I soon found myself trying to copy him, so impressed was I with his way of being. This proved impossible. My more judgmental nature usually triumphed over my will. Even if I avoided making a critical remark or suppressed a pleased reaction to someone’s small failure, the internal judge in me failed to purge itself.
What enabled him to be this way? Partly, it was just the way he was. He owned a greater capacity for empathy than the average person. But the more I watched him, the more I realized that a big reason was that he understood people better than we did. He had a highly developed understanding of what caused people’s behavior, and this made him resistant to blaming people for their failures. He had suffered his share of hard knocks. Only in his early 30s when I knew him, he was already losing his sight because of diabetes that had struck him in early childhood. He would sometimes grab a candy bar, throw some change in the cash drawer, and eat it quickly as he went back to his office. Through the crack in the manager’s door, I had once seen him injecting himself with insulin. He had only a high school education, and I suspect that he missed an early opportunity to go college. For some people, hardships make them resentful; in his case, these setbacks made him alert to the circumstances that can hold people back. Many people make quick negative judgments when seeing those around them fail (making it easy to find humor in their failings). My boss’ instinct was to look for those circumstances beyond their control that may have caused their failure. He seemed temperamentally inclined to wonder what in their lives may have constrained them to act as they did.
I reflect on my boss because, as I near the end of this book, it is worth considering how we might curb our natural leaning to feel schadenfreude. I hope it is clear from earlier chapters that schadenfreude often goes with the grain of human nature rather than against it. But I think there is a lot we can learn from my boss if we want to avoid making schadenfreude a habit. By focusing on the situational factors that are often overlooked, the major causes of other people’s misfortunes, we will feel empathy rather than schadenfreude.
The consideration of situational factors is not so easily done, however—there is at least one countervailing psychological bias that we need to overcome, what social psychologists sometimes call the “fundamental attribution error.” This bias refers to our dual tendencies to overattribute the causes of other people’s behavior to their internal qualities along with overlooking the possible role of situational causes. This bias goes precisely in the opposite direction of what leads to empathy, producing schadenfreude instead when others suffer.
I once saw a man get angry with a nurse in a hospital waiting room. What a jerk, I thought. This was my quick, automatic reaction. But then I caught myself. Some years earlier, I had also lost my patience with a nurse in an emergency waiting room. My eldest daughter had hit her head while playing on a slide and needed immediate medical attention. After an hour of waiting, I had reached my limit with the triage system and had started protesting insistently to a nurse. Soon, a doctor examined my daughter, and, 20 stitches later, we left the hospital. With the surfacing of this strong memory, I questioned my initial reaction to the man’s behavior. I wondered whether this man had a good reason for losing his cool, too.
We see a man get angry with a nurse and our quick inference is that he must be a hostile person. This “explains” his behavior. He may be under enormous emotional stress—but we usually settle for thinking “what a jerk!” Unless we can put ourselves in the man’s shoes and discover the situation from his perspective, this attributional bias will often prevail.5
This attributional bias has a direct bearing on how we react to the misfortunes of others. If I perceive the misfortune of another to be the result of that person’s internal disposition or moral failing, then I’ll probably think he deserves what he gets and I may feel a rush of pleasure at his pain. If I perceive his misfortune to be the result of the situation, then I may conclude that he does not deserve it and I will feel empathy—not schadenfreude. Let’s say I made the assumption that the man yelling at the nurse was belligerent and selfish. In the moment, I had good reason to think so and I might feel pleased if the nurse called a security guard. But what if, right before I walked into the waiting room, the man had calmly asked the nurse for an update on his wife’s condition, and the nurse had replied, “I need to be honest with you. Your wife is not going to make it. I need to attend to other patients.” Now we see the situation differently. The man’s behavior is forgivable, even commendable. Anyone who witnessed the entire exchange is unlikely to pigeonhole this man as a jerk.
Recognizing our strong tendency to make internal explanations for other people’s behavior, and the accompanying tendency to ignore situational causes, helps us avoid these tendencies when appropriate. But this recognition is difficult to achieve. A good example to illustrate the point is the classic research done on obedience to authority by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. This research was conducted in the 1960s, but, even today, it has the capacity to amaze. Most of the participants in Milgram’s studies behaved in ways that seemed sadistic, and it is tempting to damn them for it and to infer sadistic traits to explain how they acted. Indeed, when I show a film made from these original studies, many students laugh at the participants and set themselves above them—until they learn more about the research. The procedure merits a close examination.
The participants were ordinary, mostly middle-aged men who responded to an advertisement for paid participants in an experiment on learning on the Yale University campus where Milgram was a professor. They showed up, two at a time, or so it appeared, and were told that the experimenters were interested in the effects of punishment on learning. One participant, determined by drawing straws, was given the role of “teacher” and the other the role of “learner.” In fact, the procedure was rigged so that the real participant would always be the teacher. The other man was a stooge pretending to be another participant. The “learner” was instructed to memorize a list of word pairs with the expectation that the teacher would call out the first word in each pair and ask him to complete the pair in successive order. Each correct pairing would get a “good” and each incorrect pairing would result in an increasingly intense shock delivered by the teacher.
As the teacher watched, the learner was led to an adjacent room and hooked up to what appeared to be electrodes. The teacher also received a sample mild shock of 45 volts to show that the “shocks” would hurt, even at a low level. The learner then revealed information that would have weighty implication later on. He noted that a medical exam had detected a slight heart condition and asked if the shocks were dangerous. The experimenter responded confidently that they would be “painful” but cause “no tissue damage.” All communication with the learner from this point was through an intercom. Once in the control room, the teacher sat at a table facing an apparatus used for delivering the shocks. This apparatus had a series of 30 switches representing successively higher volts of electricity. The 10th level (150 volts) was labeled “Strong Shock”; the 17th level (255 volts) “Intense Shock”; the 25th level (375 volts) “Danger, Severe Shock.” At the final levels (435 and 450 volts), the control panel was marked “XXX,” suggesting especially intense danger.6
At first, the learner did well (using a programmed sequence), but he soon began making errors, requiring the teacher give him shocks by pressing down the switches, each giving a harsh buzzing sound. At 75 volts the learner responded with audible grunts, and at 120 volts, the learner shouted that the shocks were painful. Groans of pain began at 135 volts, and, at 150 volts, the learner cried out, “Ugh!!! Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here! I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.”7 However, the experimenter calmly told the teacher to continue, using a sequence of prods such as the “experiment requires that you continue” and “you have no other choice, you must go on.” At 270 volts, the learner emitted an agonized scream as well as further emphatic demands to stop the experiment. At 330 volts, the screams were intense and prolonged, and the learner, sounding panicked, complained about his heart and screamed once again to be let out. At the next voltage level, the intercom went silent, implying the real possibility that the learner had suffered a fatal heart attack.
What would you do if you were the “teacher” in this study? Milgram addressed this question to three groups: psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults, using a detailed summary of the procedure, complete with a diagram of the control panel. All 110 respondents believed that they would have disobeyed the experimenter at some point. Only four said they would obey until the shocks reached 300 volts, the highest level that anyone said they would go. The most common predicted level, for all groups, was 150 volts, and a typical explanation was “I can’t stand to see people suffer. If the learner wanted to get out, I would free him so as not to make him suffer pain.”8 Milgram worried these responses might reflect a degree of vanity. He then asked respondents to predict how 100 other Americans from diverse ages and occupations would respond. Figure 11.1 shows the predictions made by the 39 psychiatrists, whose views were essentially the same as the views of the other two groups. All who responded to the survey felt that the end of the shock board was reserved for, as Milgram called it, the “pathological fringe.”9 In fact, the group of psychiatrists predicted that most people would not go beyond 150 volts, the point in the procedure when the learner made his first demand to get out of the experiment.
I know of no more persuasive evidence for how easy it is to underestimate the powerful influence of situational forces on behavior—because all three of these groups were wildly inaccurate in their predictions. The average percentage of actual participants (top line) behaved very differently: 65 percent of participants in Milgram’s study not only went to the highest shock level, but had to be asked by the experimenter to stop giving the shocks. In summarizing the implications of the misaligned predictions made by the three groups, Milgram presaged the idea of the fundamental attribution error. He concluded that people assume that:10
Figure 11.1. Predicted vs. actual levels of obedience in the Milgram study.
Unless coerced by physical force or threat, the individual is preeminently the source of his own behavior. A person acts in a particular way because he has decided to do so. Action takes place in a physical-social setting, but this is merely the stage for its occurrence. The behavior itself flows from an inner core of the person; within the core personal values are weighted, gratifications assessed, and resulting decisions are translated into action. … Most people start with the presuppositions of this sort. … They focus on the character of the autonomous individual rather than on the situation in which he finds himself.11
Again, the implications for understanding schadenfreude are important. Misfortunes often result from deliberate actions people have taken, making them appear responsible and deserving of their suffering. But Milgram’s findings suggest that we are unlikely to recognize the situational factors that may have played a role in causing these actions. The situation “is merely the stage”12 for their enactment. This means that internal qualities will seem to explain these actions. They will fill in the causal gaps, usually making the misfortunes seem more deserved—and amusing to this extent.
Consider again To Catch a Predator, which I explored in Chapter 7, a reality TV program that I argued uses humiliation as a main hook to appeal to viewers. Each man who shows up with the apparent intentions of engaging in sexual relations with a minor is doing something that the vast majority of people assume that they themselves would not do. And so it is natural to see the man’s behavior as an expression of a flawed, perverted inner core. In fact, this assumption will seem catalyzed by the perceived absence of countering situational factors. But might there be mitigating factors? Some of these men might have been abused themselves, some may have been more vigorously enticed than others, and some may have not believed the decoy to be minor. Some may have been particularly vulnerable to the clever, persuasive tactics used by the decoy. At the very least, there is wide variation in how we might judge these men—branded sexual predators—if we knew their stories. But the tendency to make the fundamental attribution error generally, together with the manifest abnormality and repulsiveness of the behavior, would discourage anyone from looking for a more complete picture. As a packager of schadenfreude, the show is not designed for situational analysis. It is improbable for these men to be perceived as anything but wholly perverted creatures, undeserving of our concern—even deserving of their humiliation, a punishment that civilized society normally disallows. The show allows, even encourages, viewers to delight in the downfall of these “predators.”
It is so easy, perhaps automatic, to infer dispositional, internal causes for other people’s behavior—so much so that it can require focus and effort to correct this initial, automatic inference even when situational factors warrant it. A series of studies by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues shows this. In one study, participants watched a video of a woman acting in a nervous and anxious way while conversing with a man. Viewers could not hear the conversation, but subtitles on the screen told them the topics being discussed: embarrassing topics (e.g., sexual fantasies) in one condition and mundane topics (e.g., hobbies) in another. As one would expect, subsequent ratings of “dispositional anxiousness” were greater in the hobbies condition than in the sexual fantasies condition. Highlighting this situational constraint affected judgments, as viewers inferred that being asked to discuss an embarrassing topic could make a person anxious. But if someone was anxious when discussing hobbies, then “personality” was the stronger cause of the anxious behavior. More interesting was what happened in two additional conditions. Viewers watched one of the two videos, but this time they were also asked to rehearse a set of word strings at the same time. Ratings of dispositional anxiousness in both conditions resembled the rating made in the ‘hobbies’ condition without the additional cognitive task. Evidently, viewers having the additional, distracting task failed to take into account the implications of the conversation topic on anxious behavior. The woman acted in an anxious way, and therefore she was perceived as dispositionally anxious.13
These and other experiments led to the conclusion that the causal attributions for behavior we observe in others start by automatically inferring a dispositional cause. The man gets angry with the nurse, he is a hostile person; the man continues to shock the learner, he is a sadistic person; the woman is behaving nervously, she is a nervous person, and so on. There is a straight and easy path from behavior to inferring disposition that requires little cognitive effort. We may then “correct” the dispositional inference if we are made aware of situational factors that counter our initial impression. The man is not a hostile person because his wife is severely injured; the man is not sadistic because he is only doing what most people would do in this situation; the woman is not an anxious person because she is discussing an embarrassing topic. The problem is that correcting our first impressions is much less automatic. And there are innumerable ways that this correction will be prevented from ever happening. Furthermore, we have a plentiful supply of seductive personality labels that are difficult to avoid using (such as “jerk,” “sadist,” and “neurotic”) and fewer labels to describe circumstances (such as “it was a tough situation”).14
Awareness of this attribution tendency provides at least an opportunity for a more complex explanation for someone’s behavior, which might avert the instant flow of guilt-free schadenfreude. There is a clear lesson to be learned from our tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error: we would do well to make a conscious effort to learn more about the circumstances that might have caused a misfortune happening to another. Situational factors will compete on an even playing field with dispositional factors in our efforts to explain what happened. In the process, we might find ourselves less likely to laugh or smile.
It is certainly easy to find fun in the humiliation of people when we can enjoy self-righteous superiority over them or when they appear to richly deserve what they get. The strong tendency to make dispositional attributions for other people’s actions is one reason this type of fun is so common. But some people succeed better than others in resisting the tendency. My boss was an example. I cannot think of a better way to sum it up than to say that he had wisdom. Perhaps he also had a greater natural empathy for others, but I think that life taught him to focus first on the circumstances that can shape people’s behavior, especially if someone had failed or suffered from his actions. When those around my boss were quick to blame people for their failures, he bucked the instant consensus either by his silence or by offering an alternative, less condemning explanation. Did we ever catch him feeling schadenfreude? Of course. The emotion is part of everyone’s DNA. But it was never malicious, and his wisdom moderated its prevalence.
There was a touch of Abraham Lincoln in my boss. Lincoln is admired by anyone who becomes familiar with the details of his life. Early in his political career in the Illinois state legislature, he made the mistake of making fun of a fellow legislator, James Shields, by publishing satirical letters about him. Lincoln had used a pseudonym, but Shields found out, felt his honor offended, and challenged Lincoln to a duel. Together with friends on both sides, Lincoln found a way to convince Shields to call off the duel, but not until it got close to happening. This experience taught Lincoln important lessons. Ashamed by the incident, he avoided harsh satire of others in print from then on. His stump speeches could be lively in their pointed humor aimed at his opponents, but even this habit disappeared over time.15 He was so talented in mimicry and so perceptive about the human condition that these were hard habits to reverse completely, but when he lapsed, he felt chagrined and apologized.16 He walked away from fights, laughed off insults, and rejected opportunities to mock and humiliate.17
Taking the perspective of others seemed to come naturally to Lincoln. He learned how to handle people effectively through tact, which he once defined as, “the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”18 Many accounts of Lincoln’s life highlight the famous incident of his writing a critical letter to General George Meade after the battle of Gettysburg.19 Lincoln had suffered many frustrations with his generals. There had been so many missed opportunities due to incompetence or the lack of initiative in these men, but the Union victory at Gettysburg could have been a fatal blow to the Confederacy. After many clashes with terrible losses on both sides, Meade had prevailed over the Confederate army under General Robert E. Lee, causing Lee to retreat across the Potomac to regroup and to prevent complete defeat. Retreat was slowed by flooding along the river, yet Meade failed to take this opportunity to crush Lee’s army, despite explicit urgings from Lincoln by telegraph and special messenger. Thus, Lee had the time to build bridges that allowed his army’s escape. Meade’s failure to act exasperated Lincoln, and he penned a letter expressing his feelings. This is how part of it reads:
My dear General … You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him, but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit; and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him. … I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within our easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few—no more than 2/3’s of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it. … 20
Meade, sensitive to criticism, had already learned of Lincoln’s frustration through other channels and had threatened to resign because he felt the criticism undeserved. But Meade never read the letter. It was found in Lincoln’s materials after his death. On this letter, Lincoln wrote, “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.” According to historians, Lincoln saw no point in further upsetting General Meade, who had served the Union cause mightily. As distressed as Lincoln was by Meade’s inaction, he was able to suppress the impulse to send the letter.
Lincoln did not care for alcohol, especially whiskey, because he disliked the effect it had on his thinking and on his self-control. But if others wanted to drink, this was fine. In his early days, he frequented the company of heavy drinkers and could enjoy their company even as he refused to drink. Mostly notably, he did not condemn alcoholics, unlike many others who did. In fact, he felt pity and compassion—because he recognized that alcohol could often have special hold on even the best of people—this “tyrant of spirits,” as he called it.21
Lincoln’s sensitivity to the situational factors affecting other people’s behavior was not at the expense of a sense of humor. Lincoln delighted in jokes which, when he was present, were “plenty and blackberried,”22 even bad puns. He was able to tell funny yarns about people so vividly that people’s “sides were sore with laughing,” according to President Van Buren.23 But he was rarely unkind in his joking.24 Lincoln used humor to put people at ease. If he did laugh at people’s misfortunes, it was amusement that recognized human frailties that he himself shared.25 Indeed, much of Lincoln’s humor was directed at himself, especially at what he considered his “ugly” face.26
And so, Lincoln, for all his remarkable talents for seeing the humor in people’s behavior, matured into someone whose instincts leaned more toward empathy than ridicule. Lincoln came to recognize the evils of slavery, but he did not condemn Southerners for owning slaves. When Southerners complained that slavery was a difficult system to eliminate, he could appreciate this point. “I surely will not blame them,” he said, “for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly powers were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing situation.”27 When he considered the matter carefully and imagined what kind of Southerners that Northerners would be if they grew up in the South, he thought, “They are just what we would be in their situation.”28 And yet, he knew slavery was wrong, in part because he could imagine what being a slave was like. To people who argued that slavery was “a very good thing,” he noted that he had never come across someone eager to take advantage of the opportunity “by being a slave himself.”29
Lincoln was a complex man, and I do not want to make a saint out of him. My aim here is to suggest that, to the extent that he displayed traits that we admire, he was also broad in his understanding of the causes of other people’s behavior. His instincts, like those of my boss, led him to take into account the situational constraints that can play a major role in explaining people’s actions—which is at least one reason why he said things such as, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”30 He was also capable of seeing depravity in others when fitting, but in his tendency to avoid the “fundamental attribution error,” he set a good example for us all.
The additional lesson here is that we are less likely to have schadenfreude dominate our reactions to another person’s misfortune if we are able to focus on the situational factors causing the misfortune. Rather than schadenfreude, the prevailing emotion should be empathy, as it was for Lincoln, by all accounts. It is no accident that Lincoln was able to pen these immortal lines from his second inaugural address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”31