We like to think of ourselves as “fair” people e.g. when we make judgements concerning the actions and behaviors of others we do so from a neutral position, considering and weighing up all the factors at play in an unbiased manner. We often believe we are being fair and accurate even when we don’t really have enough information at hand to inform our position - when we lack a context we will imagine/create one, as our brains abhor a vacuum. This can result in us making inaccurate judgments concerning things we have witnessed and even blame people for not acting or behaving in a certain way. We may watch a clip of CCTV footage of an assault and determine that someone should have responded to a situation in such a way, that we would have dealt with it differently in order to secure a successful outcome. However, most of our social judgments are susceptible to attribution errors and biases, and these can cause us to draw wrong conclusions about the things we see, and the interactions we have with others. Whilst we may be extremely confident in our view of the world, and the way we navigate it, it is often worth considering how accurate and unbiased our attributions are, and whether the result(s) may be a flawed perception concerning our personal safety.
One way in which our attributions may be flawed, is that we tend to attribute the actions and behaviors of others to something personal and inherent about them, rather than due to situational factors and components that are at play e.g. if someone fails to recognize a threat or danger, then it is due to their lack of awareness, rather than due to the situation itself - such as an assailant making an unprovoked, spontaneous assault for no other reason than in that moment they could. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Fundamental Attribution Error”, which can really be summed up using the phrase, “I would have done it differently”. In our minds, we are not constrained by situational factors, as in our view we would have somehow managed or mitigated them – everything in hindsight is 20/20. However heavily weighted a situation is against someone, our correspondence bias, will make us believe that a person’s failure to act was due to that individual’s personal characteristics, and that even when the odds are completely and overwhelmingly stacked against them, these don’t determine the outcome but instead it is their intrinsic personal failings of the person involved that do so; dispositional rather than situational attribution. This can cause us to over-estimate our own abilities to deal with and handle difficult situations. We might think that we would spot a potential threat because we have good awareness, even though there might be little in a situation that would help you identify the danger. If we were to fail to identify such a threat, our own narrative would be that this was down to situational reasons, not personal ones.
Another attribution we are affected by is, Defensive Attribution. This occurs when we are less judgmental about a person’s actions and behavior in a situation, when we perceive them to be like us e.g. if we hear about someone who was attacked when they were drunk and unable to defend themselves, we might initially see them as facilitating, or even being somewhat responsible for, the assault in some way, however if were to later find out that they were of the same ethnicity, socio-economic demographic, age, etc., as us, and that the assault occurred in a location that we frequent, we may soften our judgment, and start to explain the assault as being the result and product of situational factors, rather than due to personal failings on the part of the individual. This is partly the result of not wanting to be perceived in a negative way, or be blamed, if we were to be attacked in a similar situation/fashion. One of the dangers of this, is that we conclude that there is nothing we could do to change the outcome if we were to be put in a similar situation, and that just as this person was unable to defend themselves, neither would we be able to i.e. the situation is outside of our control, and such violence is random and inevitable, and is controlled/dictated wholly by situational factors, which we are unable to change or influence. This can also lead us to develop an idea concerning the inevitability of being the victim of violence i.e. it is people like us who are targeted. The two often go hand-in-hand, with individuals concluding that they are likely to be attacked, and that there is nothing they can do if they are.
We also have a bias/attribution that other people’s interactions with us, are by and large related to dispositional factors, rather than situational ones. If we cut someone off in traffic, and they get angry, the part we play in their anger – the situational component – is minor, and even insignificant, and the real reason they became mad with us is that they are a nasty, angry individual. However, in contrast, if we are cut off in traffic and become angry, that’s solely down to the actions and behavior of the other person. This can cause us to underestimate the effects of how we interact with others. We may believe that taking a parking space that someone else was waiting for is a trivial matter, and that they should understand that we probably have a good reason to do so, without realizing that it is likely this action, rather than their “personality” which will cause them to become aggressive and potentially violent towards us. One of the results/conclusions of this attribution could be summed up with the phrase, “we have the right to be aggressive/angry with others whilst others don’t have the right to be angry with us”.
For us to be able to predict, identify and avoid violence, as well as having a fair understanding and appreciation of how we can respond and deal with it, when/where it is inevitable, we must understand how our attribution errors and biases effect our appreciation of violent incidents. If we simply look at violent events without understanding the filters through which we view them, we are likely to come away with a skewed picture that represents what we want to think, rather than what has actually occurred.