In a con­fus­ing world where no move makes sense,
We must look deeper into the fog and see the con­text behind each event as it unfolds.

Without tele­pathic abil­i­ties, we could never know for sure how other peo­ple think or why they choose to behave in cer­tain ways. This def­i­nitely hasn’t stopped us from try­ing though – our minds tire­lessly pro­duce, refine and share orga­nized beliefs (or schemata) about how oth­ers act based on our past expe­ri­ences. These beliefs are some­times based on time-tested the­o­ries in psy­chol­ogy, but more often than not they’re just basic intu­itions a per­son has about his friends or ene­mies. Whether we choose to laugh away a person’s quirky behav­ior, briefly scowl at an act of impo­lite­ness, or openly attack a group of indi­vid­u­als after one of its mem­bers did some­thing slightly unpleas­ant, we mostly rely on schemata to inter­pret and even­tu­ally judge each other’s actions.

Our hard-earned beliefs don’t gen­er­al­ize to the unpre­dictable thoughts and deci­sions of the generic sen­tient beings though. In the absence of other infor­ma­tion, a generic’s actions essen­tially have no inher­ent meaning.

The Strategy

It’s still pos­si­ble to under­stand why a generic sen­tient being acts it way it does – we’re just forced to look for this “other infor­ma­tion”. To under­stand, say, why Generic A would quit his job at Arbitrary Inc., we need to know what kinds of jobs Generic A is look­ing for and what the pay and work envi­ron­ment is like at Arbitrary Inc. If we wanted to be really thor­ough, we might even want to study over­all trends in the generic society’s labor force and research into how strongly Generic A gets influ­enced by what other gener­ics are doing. The best word to describe this type of infor­ma­tion is prob­a­bly con­text. Context is essen­tial in the world of the gener­ics, so we can’t imme­di­ately con­clude that Generic A was dis­ap­pointed by the pay or was blindly fol­low­ing society’s lead no mat­ter what our schemata try to tell us. Even the gener­ics have long learned that they need con­text to under­stand each other’s choices.

From the exam­ple above it’s clear that con­text comes in a vari­ety of shapes and forms. You might be able to tease apart two gen­eral cat­e­gories though, one of which deals with facts and events and the other of which deals with val­ues and per­son­al­ity. I call the for­mer cat­e­gory exter­nal con­text and the lat­ter inter­nal con­text¹. This dis­tinc­tion is use­ful because it turns out gener­ics often lean heav­ily toward one of these two cat­e­gories when inter­pret­ing each other’s actions. If Generic A asks a ques­tion at a ser­vice desk and receives a short and unhelp­ful response, he might quickly con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that the clerk is lazy or irre­spon­si­ble with­out ever won­der­ing whether his ques­tion was clear enough or whether the clerk was tired after a long day at work². I call this the inter­nal attri­bu­tion error, where a generic largely ignores exter­nal con­text when inter­pret­ing the actions of oth­ers³. Conversely, a generic might abruptly dis­ap­pear from Generic B’s life and refuse to meet any­one for a week, leav­ing Generic B defen­sively scratch­ing her head won­der­ing what she had done wrong with­out con­sid­er­ing whether her friend was fac­ing an unre­lated emo­tional strug­gle. This is an exam­ple of what I call the ratio­nal choice assump­tion, where a generic treats an action as a ratio­nal response to some related past event instead of as a prod­uct of unre­lated inter­nal factors.

The Complications

Distinguishing between inter­nal and exter­nal con­text is harder than it might seem. External envi­ron­ments (real­ity) and inter­nal envi­ron­ments (the generic mind) inter­act in chaotic ways, mak­ing most con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion show both inter­nal and exter­nal aspects. For exam­ple, out­side events are often per­pe­trated by other gener­ics and there­fore can be moti­vated by per­son­al­ity or emo­tion, but a generic’s beliefs and val­ues are also strongly influ­enced by the events that occur in their world. Without too much effort, you end up with some kind of chicken-and-egg prob­lem. But then again, even if the con­text behind an action is com­pli­cated and involves both inter­nal and exter­nal fac­tors, a generic would still make the inter­nal attri­bu­tion error or the ratio­nal choice assump­tion to vary­ing degrees if they only focused on one kind of con­text. By the same argu­ment, a profi­ci­ol­o­gist also has to look for both kinds of con­text in order to get a more com­plete under­stand­ing of a generic sen­tient being’s actions.

Knowing to look for both exter­nal and inter­nal con­text is just half the bat­tle – most gener­ics try but utterly fail to under­stand each other’s actions despite know­ing what to look for. Those that do slightly bet­ter than oth­ers tend to approach the prob­lem from a sim­i­lar angle, one that I will be cov­er­ing in more detail in my next post. Is the effort actu­ally nec­es­sary though? One generic might say that con­stantly think­ing about exter­nal con­text pro­motes the kind of sci­en­tific mind­set that even­tu­ally leads to life-chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs. Another might claim that a bet­ter under­stand­ing of inter­nal con­text is badly needed in an alien­ated soci­ety where so many pre­ventable con­flicts occur and so few gener­ics stop to think about each other’s motives. Still another could argue that the gener­ics already hap­pily live in igno­rance and that the generic soci­ety would prob­a­bly remain sta­ble even if each of its mem­bers were com­pletely self-cen­tered. These are all very respectable opin­ions, and with the right con­text I could tell you exactly how those three gener­ics set­tled on their unique points of view.

1. If it helps, you can think of exter­nal con­text as “the ways in which real­ity lim­its a generic’s options and essen­tially forces him to do some­thing” and inter­nal con­text as “the ways in which a generic’s per­son­al­ity and emo­tional state made him more likely to do that thing in the first place.”
2. Whether this is a valid excuse or not is irrel­e­vant here – what’s impor­tant is that this pos­si­bil­ity never crossed our hypo­thet­i­cal Generic A’s mind.
3. It’s named after Lee Ross’s fun­da­men­tal attri­bu­tion error, with a slight change in name because the phe­nom­e­non def­i­nitely isn’t as uni­ver­sal in the world of the generics.