Fallacy Of The Worst Motive: What It Is And How It Affects Us
Think wrong and be right. To say that many have made this saying their way of thinking about others is not an exaggeration, in fact, there is even relatively recent scientific evidence about how people think that others act more for bad reasons than for good ones.
This idea that until recently was only part of popular culture has just been transformed into a theory with even an experiment behind it: the worst motive fallacy
Below we will learn more about this new cognitive bias, the experiment with which it was tested and some of the conclusions that have been reached.
People do not tend to think neutrally towards others. When someone does something we tend to judge the morality behind that action, asking ourselves what are the reasons that have made a person behave in a certain way. In fact, in philosophy of morality there is consensus that the motives behind an action are crucially important in determining the morality of the action itself, even if the action is apparently neutral.
Joel Walmsley and Cathal O’Madagain, from the University College of York and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University respectively, wanted to know to what extent people tend to attribute the worst possible motives behind people’s actions. This idea, which they have called the worst motive fallacy, holds that we are more likely to attribute negative reasons to others rather than positive ones and, consequently, thinking that people are going to behave in a way that satisfies those bad motives.
The idea behind the fallacy of the worst motive has a lot to do with a widespread belief in popular culture that is summarized in the saying “think wrong and you will be right.” When we attribute some type of moral motivation to someone, especially if it is an unknown person, as a protection against the bad things they could do, it is better to presuppose that their intentions are not good, than if a person has to choose between helping others and help herself she will choose the latter.
Antagonistic to this idea is a popular aphorism called Hanlon’s razor, which basically maintains that one should never attribute to evil what can be explained by stupidity. This idea is a warning against presupposing evil in all people since, according to this aphorism, what can really happen is that the person who does an apparently harmful action is not aware of the damage he is doing or that his motivation behind it may be has not been ignoble.
However, the existence of the proverb and its antagonistic aphorism mean that it is common in popular culture to attribute bad intentions to the actions of others and that, with the intention of preventing the proverb from being abused, the knife of Halton stands in such a way that he invites people to reflect on their way of thinking about others. Both statements made Walmsley and O’Madagain wonder if the bias of attributing bad intentions to others really existed, and they wanted to demonstrate it scientifically.
The idea of the fallacy of the worst motive is not really surprising, since it is already a classic tendency in cognitive and social psychology to propose biases in which people opt more for the bad rather than the good Many of our cognitive aspects such as attention, motivation, perception, memory and our own emotions are more strongly influenced by negative stimuli than by neutral or positive ones.
A classic example of bias in which negativity influences the way we see things is the fundamental attribution error. As people, when we have a failure or inconvenience, we attribute external causality, that is, we blame either our situation, environmental factors or other people (e.g., “I failed the exam because the teacher had a mania for me”). On the other hand, if the mistake has been made by another person, we emphasize the internal factors of her, such as her personality, character, intelligence, and own motivation (e.g., “She failed because she is a bad student, lazy, and stupid.” “)
The negativity bias is also very present in situations in which we feel that everything is going wrong for us Our way of perceiving reality causes us to pass what happens around us through a filter in which we let the bad things pass and the good things we simply ignore. This thought pattern is usually typical of very pessimistic people, with low self-esteem or, also, with a mood disorder such as depression.
Seeing these examples of biases that are influenced by negativity, the idea behind the worst motive fallacy is not surprising. When a person does something he can have a lot of different reasons for doing what he is doing. We could classify these motives in moral terms, going from more noble to more selfish and evil. Rationally we could select the most probable reason, but if all of them have the same probability of explaining the person’s behavior, the most likely thing is that we think that he does it thinking of himself with the worst reason.
Experimental approach to fallacy
In their 2020 article Walmsley and O’Madagain present two experiments, the first being the one we are going to explain as it best explains this phenomenon. In this experiment They asked their participants to read a short story in which the protagonist could have two reasons behind performing the same action In each case, one of the reasons was “good” and the other was “bad.” The protagonist discovers that he cannot do what he had planned after all, and has to choose between two alternatives, one being the one that satisfies his “good” motive and the other his “bad” motive.
In accordance with their initial hypotheses, both researchers expected that if their theory of the worst motive fallacy was real, the participants would choose the negative motive as the reason behind the character’s behavior. Furthermore, both researchers They assumed that participants would expect the character to behave to satisfy their original negative desire with which they would choose the worst action of the two proposed to them.
Each participant was given one of four different vignettes, each explaining a different story. Below we will see an extensive example of one of these stories.
A politician has just campaigned and has part of the budget left over that she decides she is going to spend hiring a computer engineer she knows. The politician does this for two reasons: one is that she knows that the engineer just lost his job and needs a new one and money, so the politician would hire him to help her; while the other reason would be that politics needs this computer scientist to send misleading messages to the supporters of his political rival and make them go to vote on the wrong day.
The policy contacts the computer engineer and describes the job. He tells him that he is not willing to do what he asks because of the ethical implications that this entails. At this point, politics can do two things: One is to hire the computer engineer anyway, who will be in charge of maintaining the computers at the party headquarters and thus help them financially, even if they are not going to do what politics wanted. The other option is not to hire him but to hire a hacker, who will have no ethical problems in sending misleading messages to the voters of his rival.
Once they had read this story, the participants were asked the following question: “What option do you think politics is going to choose?” and they were given the choice between the following two options:
After deciding which option they thought the protagonist of the cartoon would choose, the participants had to rate on a scale from good to bad the two reasons described at the beginning of the cartoon using a scale from -10 (very bad) to +10 (very bad). Well).
Taking the hypothesis of both experimenters applied to the comic that we have just read, it was expected that the participants would choose the worst motive, that is, wanting to send misleading messages to the voters of their political rival, and that consequently the politician would decide not to hire the engineer. computer but to the hacker to satisfy this will.
The researchers interpreted the participants’ responses to the question about which option they thought the protagonist of the story would choose. would be indicative of what they considered to be the main reason for their original action Since in the end the protagonist could only satisfy one of the original reasons, the action that was chosen presumably had to be the one that satisfied the most important reason for him.
Taking the idea of the fallacy of the worst motive, the researchers assumed that participants would end up being biased toward negative motives. That is to say, even if two reasons were given, one good and one bad, equally probable, the participants would value the negative one as more important, which would make them opt for the more selfish alternative when the original plan could not be fulfilled. .
In addition to the vignette explained above, Walmsley and O’Madagain presented three other vignettes to the study participants. One was a man who had to decide whether to take the bus to town to buy a gift for his friend or take the train to rob a pensioner, a girl who goes to a party and must decide whether to wear a dress that will embarrass her. the host or a couple of Texans who are going to make his mother happy and a university student who has to decide whether to go to France on vacation hoping to cheat on his girlfriend or go to Argentina to see his cousins and learn Spanish.
The results of their experiment were quite interesting since they revealed scientific evidence that people tend to attribute bad motives to people, especially if they are strangers. In those situations in which instead of being able to do good and evil simultaneously (e.g., giving work to the computer scientist and deceiving the supporters of the political rival) the person can only choose one option or the other, We tend to think that her original motivation was bad and that, therefore, she will choose the option that satisfies her
Possible causes
The fallacy of the worst motive fits perfectly with the immense family of negative biases, now classics in psychology. People evaluate other people’s motivations and morality more critically and negatively. We consider that the worst reasons are what motivate the actions of others, and negative reasons are the main reasons that generate the behavior of people we do not know or distrust, or even people close to us who, although we like them, we cannot help but think that They are less moral and strong than ourselves.
One of the possible explanations for the occurrence of this fallacy according to the researchers themselves is our evolutionary history and could have adaptive advantages People, even wanting the best, prepare for the worst, paying special attention to the negative. Applied to the history of evolution, it was better to flee from what was suspected to be dangerous even if it was not and meant the loss of a very good opportunity than to trust in something that was dangerous, make a mistake and put our physical integrity at risk. or even lose your life.
Be that as it may, it is clear that our thinking pattern is biased towards negativity, having very strongly internalized the philosophy of “think wrong and you will be right”. It is not something bad in itself, and even more so taking into account its possible evolutionary implications, but it certainly conditions our way of perceiving others, a perception that if it becomes extremely negative could cause us problems such as attributing guilt or evil to others. people who didn’t want to do any harm.
