The Ice Cream Scoop of Character and Context
We need to make a concerted effort to develop [compassion]; we must use all the events of
our daily life to transform our thoughts and behaviour.”
–The Dali Lama Compassion and The Individual
Sunny day. Neighbourhood yard sale. You’re standing at a fold-out table at the neighbourhood yard sale. You’re selling ice cream to the neighbours. Your kid brother shows up and gives you a dollar. You swish your ice cream scoop in water and pull out the tub of Chapman’s Vanilla. You give him one small scoop. You normally give two generous scoops for a dollar, but yesterday your brother borrowed your bike without asking, so he’s dead to you today.
He complains, “Hey! One tiny scoop?” and storms off.
A minute later the neighbour kid comes to the table and says, “Um, my mother said I needed to come back. I gave you a five, remember?” You remember taking the five dollar bill and giving him only two bowls of ice cream. “Oops,” you say, “I must’ve been distracted.” You magnanimously hand your friend three dollars change. “Mistakes happen,” you say to yourself and quickly forget about it.
Feeling good, you reach in the cooler and scoop yourself a big portion of Hagn Daz.
That, my friends, is the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s when we attribute the “bad” behaviour of others to character (he’s a jerk), and our own “bad” behaviour to context. (I made a mistake because I was distracted.)
Because we live in our own skin all the time, we generally scoop out lots of reasons for our own behaviour and it’s easier for most people to chalk a mistake up as a mistake. I think that’s fine. The problem is that sometimes we don’t afford others the same consideration. We look at one single variable and use that to determine how we treat them. The one thing our brother does makes him a jerk. And we only scoop out single dollop of Chapman’s Vanilla as retribution.
Obviously, a better way is when we ask ourselves why the person did what they did. It’s worth finding out why your brother borrowed your bike in the first place. And even if he took it for “selfish” reasons, he brought it back and didn’t wreck it, you can probably forgive him fairly quickly.
Even if you can’t forgive him and he remains dead to you, the act of being curious and seeking to understanding the context in which he made his decision has not harmed you in any way. And in the long run, it will save to time, effort, and stress. Finding context now will stop us from needless judgement and stress in the future.
That is one thing that people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around: being considerate to other people has no down side. Being considerate does not mean that we must put up with bad behaviour and it stops us from committing our own thoughtless actions towards others.
Where the Ice Cream Scoop of Character and Context comes in handy is a tool for understanding, first. For deciding not to judge someone’s character, but rather to look at their actions in context. It doesn’t matter if we want to be angry or if we want to forgive, what matters is that we seek first to understand. And maybe even to relate. And once we have walked around in someone else’s shoes for a minute, then we can try to be reasonable. If amid all our feelings we still stop to try to use the Ice Cream Scoop of Character and Context, we will be fairer to ourselves and to others more often. And we will avoid committing the Fundamental Attribution Error.
I guess the long and short of it is this: I’m all for forgiving ourselves for our simple mistakes. I hope others forgive us, too. My point isn’t that we beat ourselves up more, it’s that we are more balanced. One mistake committed by another person should be weighted the same as the same sort of mistake committed by you.
It all starts with a scoop!
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Notes:
1)You’ll see that this goes right along with Tool #13 “The Grocery Store Divider of Discernment.”
2) There was a time when Chapman’s ice cream tasted like cleaning chemicals and food colouring. It’s gotten better.