Why we judge others' intentions more harshly than our own
When we are wrong, circumstances explain it. When someone else is wrong, what explains it is what they are. This asymmetry has a name and direct political effects.
A documented asymmetry
Social psychology has described, under the name of the fundamental attribution error, our tendency to explain another's conduct by their character, while underestimating the weight of the situation. Work on the actor-observer asymmetry added a decisive point: for our own conduct, we do the reverse and give the situation its full place.
The explanation is partly banal: we know our constraints, our hesitations, our missing information, and of the other we see only the result. The imbalance of information produces an imbalance of judgement, without any malevolence being necessary.
Later work has qualified the size of the phenomenon according to cultures and situations, but the direction of the asymmetry is robust. What varies is its strength, not its direction.
What this gives on political subjects
On a position we do not share, the first available explanation is intention: self-interest, indifference, bad faith. The explanations that require more work, such as different information, different experience or a different hierarchy of priorities, come afterwards, when they come.
The mechanism is self-sustaining. Once intention is supposed, the other's arguments are read as justifications, which makes examining them pointless. Each then finds themselves debating not with a position, but with the motive they have imputed to it.
It further produces a false and lasting prediction: if the opponent acts out of self-interest, they should change their mind when their interest changes. Since that does not happen, one concludes to blindness, which closes the last door.
The role of distance
The asymmetry grows with distance: the more a person is a stranger to us, the more we explain what they do by what they are. Conversely, we spontaneously grant those close to us the benefit of circumstances.
That is why the same position seems sensible in a colleague and absurd in a stranger who expresses it online. It is not the position that changes, it is the quantity of context available to us.
A simple test
Formulate the position you are fighting in the terms in which its defender would formulate it, without irony, and ask yourself whether those terms hold up. If you cannot produce that version, it is likely that you have not yet encountered the position, only its caricature.
The exercise does not lead to agreeing with the other, and that is not its purpose. It aims to make sure that the disagreement bears on something real, which is the minimum condition for it to be interesting.
What this changes for reading oneself
The same asymmetry operates when one reads one's own profile. The positions that flatter us are attributed to our reflection, those that bother us to the circumstances of the sitting or to a badly asked question.
It is worth spotting this temptation. A position that displeases you in your own result is the only place where you can learn something: everywhere else, you are merely recognising yourself.
Key points
We explain our own conduct by the situation and that of others by their character.
The asymmetry grows with distance: the less one knows someone, the more one explains them by what they are.
Imputing an intention dispenses one from examining the arguments, which closes the discussion.
Being able to restate the opposing position in its own terms is a test of understanding.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
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