I have a friend who I always hang out with at least once or twice every week. However, for the one-week long reading break, she didn’t have any time available to spend with me together any more, and she said every single day from the reading break was fully scheduled already. During the reading break, I texted her on Facebook, but it showed that she didn’t see my message, which is not like what she does to me at all. Usually, I can get her responses very instantly after my message.

Certainly, I was really confused and puzzled in the beginning why she can’t spend any time with me but rather with so many others in the break, and why she just ignored my message sent to her. I really can’t get over my feelings, and later turned annoyed and disappointed at her for not hanging out with me in the entire reading break and not seeing my message. I was thinking she was just mean to me or not interested in me any more.

In the chapter 2 of the text book, there is a section about attribution theory. It describes that we tend to explain all unusual behaviors as caused by either internal factors or external factors. And fundamental attribution errors are very common that we often underestimate external factors and overestimate internal factors when judging behaviors of others. In order to determine whether a behavior is internally caused or externally caused, we know frequency definitely matters, but there are still 3 main criteria around the frequency:

• Distinctiveness: How often does she make the same behaviors in other situations?
• Consensus: How often do other people do this in similar situations?
• Consistency: How often does she do this in the past?

By those criteria to determine if the behaviors of my friend are caused internally or externally, I found I made a mistake in fundamental attribution error that I intuitively had just thought she was being mean or ignorant to me, attributing her behaviors straight to internal reasons. But I didn’t consider that her schedules were really made full and busy by her friends who she had not seen for a while.  In previous weekends or breaks, she had never avoided to hand out with me before. Her other friends also spent the reading break to hang out with her with sacrifices not to see their friends, and the situation on me is applied.

After careful thought about what had happened before and the concepts in organizational behavior class, I found I shouldn’t just judge on others’ behaviors instinctively by their personalities. Rather, I should try figuring out their past or history first in order to attribute their behaviors to more objective reasons.

Word count: 452

Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 39-40.