Family Discussion

I can recall a time where I experienced the defensive bias due to the belief in a just world. This is where people explain away others' suffering as due to those people's personal actions and disregard the situation, in order to feel safe that it couldn't simply 'happen to anyone'.

I was talking to my mother about my job at College Forward and how the kids sometimes lose focus. She reminded me that she got through college as a single mother raising two kids and thought that anyone who couldn't get a higher education was lazy, or at the least that it was no one's fault but theirs.

I told asked her if it was okay to blame an addicted homeless drunk for the situation he was in. She thought it was okay, there's plenty of help to get out of that, most people just don't want to. Then I asked her if it was okay for someone who won the Nobel Prize or an Oscar to go up on stage and say, "I don't want to thank anyone other than me, because I'm here because of me, and don't owe anybody anything. All me, yep, thanks."

She obviously thought that wasn't okay, and I simply pointed out that the reason why she believed such a thing was because she wasn't giving enough thought to social factors in the homeless persons life and past life, and was giving that consideration to those who got somewhere great. Maybe there is another effect where people look at those who are more successful than themselves and automatically attribute that success to situational factors, so as not to feel bad that they themsleves haven't achieved as much.