Aronson’s first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. (Location 286) 📜 One central discovery of social psychology is that people are prone to explain unpleasant behavior by assigning personality traits to the perpetrator, such as “psychotic,” “sadistic,” or “evil.” Most people — particularly those of us from Western cultures — do this spontaneously, without intention or conscious awareness, as a way of organizing and categorizing information and satisfying a need to feel in control of events. This dispositional view of human actions refers to the assumptions that people who do crazy things have a personality disposition to be crazy, people who do stupid things must be stupid, only evil people do evil things, people who do nice things are nice, and so on. (Location 295) Yet that assumption is often a mistake, an oversimplification, and we pay a price for it, (Location 302)
Dispositionalism can make us smug about our own invulnerability to pressures that could induce us to behave stupidly, crazily, or cruelly. It moves the focus off of improving situations and onto a narrow approach to fixing people: Is a manager worried about employees who steal? Let’s give everyone a personality test to try to diagnose who will steal in the future, and never mind whether our employees are stealing because they feel overworked, resentful, and underpaid. Are we worried about students who might become violent? Let’s give everyone a personality test and try to predict which of the unhappy or bullied kids we identify might erupt one day, and let’s not ask questions about the world in which those kids struggle every day. (Location 303) What I am saying is that some situations can cause a surprisingly large proportion of us “normal” adults to behave in unexpected, unappetizing, and sometimes abnormal ways. It is of paramount importance to understand what is going on in those situations that can produce unpleasant or destructive behavior. (Location 310)