His fault not mine
Thursday, January 25, 2007
An interesting pattern of human behavior was brought up in my MPW class by my Professor (MPW being the acronym for Managing People at Work.) I can’t remember the exact terms used but simplified, this is basically the underlying principle. In general, we generally identify two factors to be cause of a fault, the two factors being situation and character. We tend to associate our own faults with situational causation but character causation with the faults of others.
I elaborate. When your friend is late, the most common reaction would be “Oh, so-and-so is always late. He/she has no concept of time and can be bothered to be punctual.” The attribution you make to the person as the cause of the fault is his character. However if the person who is late is yourself, the justification is most commonly “Oh the bus was late. There was a traffic jam.” So on and so forth. Evidently, it is never a fault of your character whenever you are late but rather the situation, one that is out of your control, is the reason why you are late. Simply put you make excuses for yourself to preserve the integrity of your character but don’t bother to do that for others.
This is obviously a flawed study for it is never my fault when I am late and I never make excuses to preserve the integrity of my character. My character is bright, shiny and pristine. I was in fact late for that particular lesson and the reason I was late, as it invariably is for any situation in which I was late, it was circumstances out of my control that led me to be late. What happened was that while I did miss my train by about 20 seconds, I was still early and had boarded the next train at 3pm. Since traveling to City Hall from Bedok takes an average of 20mins and walking time is about 7mins, I would still be on time. A minute later however, the train refused to move and an irritating voice belonging to a shrill control station woman came on the PA system telling us to seek an alternative transport and that the train services would be held up indefinitely.
So it turns out, the train I missed would go two stations west and hit a man at Eunos MRT station. Reports indicate that it was not a suicide but bystanders could not explain what happened. Most likely he stood
beyond the yellow line and was clipped by the train. (That will teach all of you to listen to the damn warnings) The man, a newly wed was thrown forward and landed on the track when the train
literally knocked his shoes off. A picture taken on site showed his shoes some 10-12m apart. Amazing the man escaped death and as far as I know is now recovering in the hospital.
As you can see the reason why I was late was obviously circumstantial and beyond my control, however the reason why the man was hit was most probably because he was careless and/or reckless and did not bother to heed clear instructions, a fault with his character.
Things on my mind:
Pirates!
Reluctance to begin studying
John Lim (Watch out for my next post)
Boobs
Sprouting Nonsense Since 1984 {1:49 pm}
