So all the fans, commentators and people (including me) had one perspective of the game and the referee had a different one. If we would have made the effort to understand what the referee did we would have saved ourselves a couple of hours of stress and ranting on how bad the referee was. Probably the referee’s mother would have benefited from that, as i’m sure she doesn’t like to be called a b**ch. 

Then while doing my daily cardio (usually where I get most of my ideas. Do some exercise people, it helps.) i was thinking on how many times and in how many situations we fail to incorporate other perspectives to our judgments and we end having bad feelings or committing several “Attribution Errors”. Lately I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I began to participate in  Venessa Miemis’ blog and to support her initiative to have a conversation platform that could help us solve some of the though subjects the world is facing and going to face in the future. 

Part of our preparation to enter a debate space, that has as its main goal to come out better than we get in, involves is to be able to see things from other perspective. This is called empathy and we should have it, because not being able to understand an opposing point of view can lead to all the outcomes we saw reflected in the twitter updates of the USA fans. When we’re passionate about a subject and someone sees it in a different way and has a different opinion we may start to get irritated, then yell, stop the debate or attribute certain characteristics to the person with the opposite opinion. Being passionate is good, but when we see we’re not getting anywhere by being passionate we should stop and think “Why is this person thinking what is he thinking?”, “What can she see that we can’t see?”. This will allow us to asses that the differences come from a point of view and not from that person being [insert adjectives here]. That is the usual attribution error we find when discussing change initiatives.

 In Switch, How to change things when change is hard, the Heath brothers talk about the attribution error that is basically assign certain characteristics to a person (crazy, stupid, irresponsible, etc.) because of what that person does and says instead of taking in consideration the context and the frame of reference that person has to say something or act in a certain way. For example, if i arrive late to work i could be seen as an irresponsible person and people would start to gossip about me being late and my boss will get angry and tell me that i need to be more responsible or i may lose my job. On the other hand if my boss knew that i was late because the roads are closed because there was an accident involving several cars, he would understand that the situation affected my time of arrival to work and not any characteristic intrinsic to me.

The attribution error and personal conflicts inside a debate are probably one of the causes why law systems around the world fail to evolve with the rest of society and the private sector. Different points of view lead to disagreements which lead to frustration and the attribution error, and this leads to people stopping the debate to focus on personal attacks.  Then there’s also problems with parents, spouses, kids, neighbors, classmates, etc. Many of this problems appear because of lack of empathy. Probably lack of empathy is one of the reasons why debate on gay marriage doesn’t get far before it turns into a personal fight.

If we want to have productive conversations we should make an effort to see where other people’s statements and actions are coming from. This can be achieved following some or all of the next steps:

• Taking a break from the conversation to think and write down some ideas
• Asking question such as:
• Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
• What are the sources for that statement?
• What is your background in [insert subject here]?
• Can you tell me how did you came with that conclusion?
• Trying to get to know the person outside of the conversation context to understand the scenarios where this person got their thoughts and what cultural differences there between us.
• Moving on to a following point while agreeing to see the point afterwards and study it in detail as a group that is tolerant.