You are two-faced. Here's why.

We hate it. A person acts a certain way in one place and acts different in another. It’s demonised and we will quickly turn away from people who are two-faced. But I’m telling you, you are two-faced. It’s because of a glitch in your brain. In ‘The Tipping Point’ Malcolm Gladwell discusses the power of context and it’s influence on how we view people’s personalities. The book's focal point is on what makes epidemics spread, but I thought this was a gloriously controversial point to write about. 

Let me put this to you. I would like you to describe your closest friend in a short sentence.

Chances are, you’ve come up with an explanation along the lines of ‘Beth is a wonderfully kind person’

As humans, we love singularities and absolutes. It is a coping mechanism that helps us make sense of the world around us, using human personalities as a tool for cognition. However, Zimbardo (one of the psychologists behind the famous Stanford Prisoner experiment) suggests that we are deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behaviour when we forget the crucial role of situations, or context. Beth can probably be very mean with people she despises, for example.

Quick example: A group of seminarians were asked to prepare a talk for a bible group on ‘the Good Samaritan’, then walk over to a nearby building and present it. Along the way, the psychologists made sure the seminarians would run into a slumped man, clearly sick in need of help. Would the seminarians stop? Our mind, using absolutes, would say yes, most of these people would stop; they are the most selfless people imaginable.

But the psychologists introduced a variable, where they would either say “oh you’re late”, or “you’re a bit early, but may as well head over now” before the seminarians left for the talk. This had a profound effect. “It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not increase helping behaviour” concluded Darley and Batson. Only 10% of the rushed group stopped, versus 63% of the other group. The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush.

This is classic. The reason this shocks us is because we want to look for a dispositional explanation to why the seminarian didn’t stop (i.e. wow what a two-faced person), as opposed to looking objectively and using a contextual explanation (i.e. they were simply late).

Gladwell summarises: ‘Character then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in our brains’ which psychologists call FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error).

Next time you brand someone two-faced, think carefully about the situation they were put in, it had a much bigger effect than you might think.