THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 12

In ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ what was the one simple trick that Scout’s father taught her about how to get along with all kinds of people?

Subject:  Egocentric Bias - Atticus’ Lesson

Event:  The New York Times publishes an article entitled, “A Bias Puts Self at the Center of Everything,” 1984

Don't over-estimate your own merits. . . . don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.  And . . . don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.  -Bertrand Russell,

When you get an exam back with a bad grade, are you more likely to say the exam was a poor measure of your knowledge rather than that your poor grade was a result of your own poor preparation?

When your favorite sports team wins, do you say “We won!”?  When that same team loses, do you say “They lost”?

When you think about events from 5 years ago, are you more likely to remember events from your own experience rather than events that were in the news?

If you answered yes to these questions, you’re not alone.  They are a natural outgrowth of a phenomenon known as the egocentric bias, the tendency we all have to overestimate our own importance and influence, and to rely a bit too much on just our own point of view.

                                                        Image by Nimrod Oren from Pixabay

On this day in 1984, writer Daniel Goleman published an article in The New York Times on the egocentric bias entitled, “A Bias That Puts Self at the Center of Everything.” In the article, Goleman presented findings that revealed that the influence of egocentricity is much greater than psychologists had initially thought.  

In a study done at the University of Rochester, for example, subjects participated in group discussions.  After these discussions, individuals evaluated their own contributions to the group.  Based on these self-evaluations, researchers concluded that individuals consistently overestimated how much attention they received from others in the group, how much they influenced the opinions of others, and how much others in the group commented about them.

Another area where the egocentric bias plays a large role is in memory.  Studies reveal that people tend to revise recalled events, enhancing their own importance.  Like an author crafting a drama, they make themselves the protagonist.

According to Dr. Anthony Greewald:

The mind is organized to perceive and store information in terms of the egocentric bias. It serves an essential cognitive function: the bias organizes our experience in a stable and consistent way so that we can later recall it. The self is like the indexing system of a library. Once you arrange information according to one system - what happened to me - if you switch systems you'd be completely lost. (1)

Understanding the egocentric bias helps us realize that our perception of reality is a distorted one and that our memory is skewed by our own first person point of view.  It also helps us understand our tendency to take things more personally than we should. 

An illustration of the egocentric bias and an antidote for how to overcome it can be found in the opening chapters of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. On Scout’s first day of school, seemingly everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, especially when it comes to her relationship with her teacher, Miss Caroline. As Scout tearfully recounts her run-ins with her teacher to her father, she declares that she doesn’t ever want to return to school again.

At this point, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, shares a valuable lesson with her:

`First of all,' he said, 'if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.' (2)

What Atticus is doing is challenging Scout to overcome her egocentric point of view by expanding her perspective in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes.  The egocentric bias makes us perceive the world from a first person point of view; Atticus reminds us that we can expand our perspective of the world by considering alternative narratives from the points of view of other people. 

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the egocentric bias, and how does it distort our perception of both the present and the past?

Challenge:  Literature other points of view - a character

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

June 12, 1942:  On this day a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank received a birthday gift -- a red and white checkered autograph book.  Instead of collecting the signatures of others in the book, Anne decided to use it as a diary to record her own thoughts. She spent 25 months hiding in an annex above her father’s office in Amsterdam before she and her family were betrayed, arrested, and transported to Nazi concentration camps.  Anne died of typhus in 1945 while in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.  In her diary, Anne’s remarkable courage and vivid insights into the human condition live on.  Anned’s diary has inspired millions of readers around the world and has been translated into 67 languages.

Sources:

1-Goleman, Daniel. “A BIAS PUTS SELF AT CENTER OF EVERYTHING.”  The New York Times, 12 June 1984.

2-Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York :Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.