Tiredness is not a mood
Much of what we attribute to our character, to the person facing us or to the situation in fact belongs to an earlier state with nothing to do with any of them.
A cause that is not seen
An affective state rarely presents itself with its original label. Irritation appears, it immediately finds an object in what is going on, and the object found seems obvious: that remark, that delay, that person.
The attribution is all the more solid for being plausible. Nothing obliges one to look further, and the tiredness accumulated over three days does not present itself as a candidate, since it is not an event.
The mechanism of misattribution
Psychology has documented this phenomenon under the name misattribution of arousal. The best-known experiment, conducted by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in 1974, shows that men approached in the middle of an unstable footbridge call the researcher back more often than those approached on a stable bridge: the arousal due to fear is attributed to attraction.
The mechanism is general. An indistinct bodily state receives a label supplied by the present situation, and the label then appears to have been there from the start.
What tiredness shifts
The interval between feeling and response narrows with tiredness, hunger, noise, repetition. The same person, in the same context, at two different moments, does not have the same margins.
This explains a banal and often misread observation: someone contains themselves for six weeks, then gives way all at once over a trivial matter. Those around judge the reaction disproportionate to the last episode, and they are right. It is not disproportionate to the series.
The rhythms we forget
Research conducted by experience sampling, questioning participants several times a day, has produced a striking result: the variability of one person over the course of a day is often greater than the average difference between two people.
In other words, the hour at which you are asked the question sometimes counts for more than who you are. This observation invites caution about any self-description established at a given instant, including the one a test produces.
One more question, not a method
There is no technique to propose here, and that is not this review's purpose. There is only one more question, the one a quick attribution skips: how long has this been here, and was it already here before the current scene?
Asking that question dissolves nothing. It only changes what one is answering, which is already considerable when the answer involves someone else.
Key points
An indistinct state receives a label supplied by the present situation, which then appears obvious.
Tiredness reduces the interval between feeling and response, while never presenting itself as a cause.
The variability of one person over the course of a day often exceeds the average gap between two people.
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.
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