The Fundamental Attribution Error And How It Works in Your Favor
Sometimes students stress about the 650-word limit because they fear they cannot possibly tell their life story in so short a space. Let me reassure you on that: No, you cannot possibly tell your life story in so short a space. You aren’t meant to.
If you are an aspiring fashion model, do I need to see your whole closet to know that you have good taste, or just one perfectly put-together ensemble? If you are an artist, do you display your sketchpad, or your completed works? The college application should be a curated gallery, with your essay as one careful portrait.
In other words, the goal of your essay is to introduce yourself by highlighting a few key features. Then, you let the FAE do the rest.
The Fundamental Attribution Error is one of the human brain’s attempts to make the world easier to explain. It is the belief that how a person acts in one scenario is how they always act—that behavior is based on character traits (like “work ethic” or “friendliness”) and not on context. (When you looked at the lead photo, did you think “lazy” or “exhausted”?) In other words, we tend to believe that how a person behaves in one situation is predictive of how they will behave in any situation. They’re just “that kind of person.”
Of course, the world is not easy to explain, and that’s why the FAE is an error. The truth is, a student might be prone to cheating on tests at school, where the pressure is high, even though she wouldn’t dream of cheating in a game with her friends, cheating on her boyfriend, or shoplifting. I myself am a scrupulously honest person … unless you’re asking about the scone that was left over at breakfast. In that case, I haven’t seen it.
In fact, several sociological studies have found that context is significantly more important than ‘character’ or ‘personality’ when it comes to predicting people’s behavior. For example, in one study, sociologists tracked boys at a summer camp for several months. They found, for example, that how talkative a boy was at lunch one day was highly predictive of how talkative he would be at lunch the next day. But it was not at all predictive of how talkative he might be at any other time. That finding was surprising. Perhaps even more surprising? Although the boys’ counselors tracked these varied observations of the boys’ changing behavior in different contexts, when they were asked for final impressions of the boys, they remembered them as highly consistent. In other words, if Johnny’s counselor saw him as a talkative boy because he talked through every meal, he simply wouldn’t remember the times Johnny was quiet.
This might be disconcerting, but it’s actually good news for your essay. You’ve been wondering how you were going to convey in 650 words the ‘type of person’ you are. Now you understand that if we see you do X, Y and Z, then we are going to believe not just that you did them one time, but that you are the ‘type of person’ who does X, Y and Z.
For more fascinating reading on the FAE—and an incredible piece of literary journalism to inspire your writing—check out Malcolm Gladwell’s “The New-Boy Network,” originally published in the New Yorker. Gladwell writes about the importance of the FAE in the job interview, an experience very similar to the college application process.
The ‘first impression’ you are creating in your essay is going to predispose your reader to like you—or not. Gladwell wrote: “The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we hear what we expect to hear. The interview is hopelessly biased in favor of the nice.” This is good news, because whether or not the admissions committee sees you as nice is entirely in your hands.
(Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash.)
