I had an unpleasant encounter this morning. I’d booked a meeting room and assumed it was empty because I was able to book the room. When I walked into the room, there was someone in the room and they got quite angry with me. They reprimanded me to “Knock beforehand” and “Close the door” before storming out of the room.
I was stunned, and angry, and sad. I’d never had someone speak to me so rudely at work. I felt wronged by this person. Why get angry at me for walking into a room I’d booked? They could have booked the room but didn’t.
As the anger was washing over me, my mind immediately jumped to character judgements. “What a rude person!” “I bet they’re just mean.” “How did someone like that get a job here?”. They were probably making similar character judgements about me “How rude to barge in!” “They don’t even have the decency to give me privacy to finish up what I was doing?”
This situation reminded me of the fundamental attribution error: “The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.”
Curiosity and practicality are key here. If I proceed with the judgement that they were simply a rude person then it’s easy to continue to vent all day about how unlucky I am to have encountered such a person. Woe is me. I am the victim. Everyone pity me. I have good reason to stay angry. I don’t want to be angry all day. Nor do I want to be the victim. Instead, I can choose to get curious about the circumstances that may have driven a perfectly reasonable human being, like myself, to act in the way they did this one time. Perhaps they were dealing with a family emergency and grabbed the first room they could find. Perhaps they needed privacy to grieve. Or maybe they were dealing with an urgent work task where they needed uninterrupted focus time.
It doesn’t actually matter what the truth is. What matters is choosing to believe in circumstance rather than character lets me move on with my day and connect with strangers in our shared humanity and difficult circumstances.