An illustration of biased thinking: My view of a legendary football coach

The day before I started writing this article, the iconic Bill Belichick stepped down from his duties as head coach of the National Football League’s New England Patriots after a storied run which included a record six Super Bowl titles. What led me to write this article about Mr. Belichick was not his unrivalled success. Instead, it was my long-standing view of him and how it recently changed.

I had a fixed perception of ‘Hoodie’ based largely on his behaviour at many post-game press conferences over the years. That perception was rocked by my listening to comments by people who interacted with Mr. Belichick as well as by the head coach’s statement at his farewell press conference. I realized that my long-established evaluation of him was largely the result of my committing the biased thinking pattern known as the fundamental attribution error. In the following sections, I will discuss how this psychologist, who has given university lectures about the fundamental attribution error, succumbed to it in forming my view of Mr. Belichick.

The fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error refers to a bias people have in considering the causes of someone’s behaviour. This entails people in general tending to favour personality as an explanation of the behaviour of someone they are observing rather than alternative explanations such as factors which are present in the situation when the behaviour occurs.

For example, if you were to view someone behaving aggressively research predicts that you would tend to assume that the behaviour is the result of the person having an aggressive personality—that is, that they tend to behave aggressively in most situations. You would tend to overlook explanations focusing on situational factors such as someone having provoked the person.

My experiences perceiving Coach Belichick

Apart from observing him on the sidelines of Patriots games, my experiences perceiving Coach Belichick were primarily from watching countless post-game press conferences. My impression of his behaviour during these question-and-answer sessions with the media was consistently negative.

He would regularly avoid answering what I thought were legitimate questions, was rude and rarely smiled. I had seen him behave in this way so many times over several years that I attributed the behaviour to his personality. I concluded that he was an unfriendly and rude person who behaved consistently with his personality at post-game press conferences.

When I realized I had committed the fundamental attribution error

I realized I had committed the fundamental attribution error in my perception of Mr. Belichick on the day he stepped down as head coach of the Patriots. I came across evidence from several people who know Mr. Belichick and from Mr. Belichick himself of his behaving in a positive manner completely opposite to his rude and unfriendly behaviour at post-game press conferences.

Stephen A. Smith, host of the television sports talk show First Take, said he regularly ran into Mr. Belichick at Boston Celtics basketball games and found him to be very personable. A former player coached by Mr. Belichick said on First Take that the coach encouraged him to maximize his potential by setting him up in a training and weight loss program and checked him on him regularly while he was in the program.

In his farewell press conference, Mr. Belichick could not have been more gracious and classier. He expressed his appreciation to the owner, management, support staff, coaches, players, fans, family and even the media. He said he respected what they did and that, even though he often did not see eye-to-eye with them, he recognized their importance to the game. As I watched with my jaw dropping in disbelief, I wondered who this person was at the podium and what had they done with Bill Belichick!

On reflection, it hit me that I had committed the fundamental attribution error in my perception of him. In watching him regularly behave in a negative manner at post-game press conferences, I had underestimated the effect of the situation in its impact on his behaviour. I did not consider that post-game press conferences often feature contentious exchanges between the media on the one hand and players and coaches on the other hand.

The result is that a player or coach who might behave in a positive manner in other situations is prone to behave in a negative manner in that situation. Given that I had almost exclusively seen Mr. Belichick talk at post-game press conferences, I erroneously attributed his behaviour to his personality to the point that I thought he was a complete jerk!

What I learned from my mistake

My mistake in assuming that Mr. Belichick’s behaviour at post-game press conferences was driven by his personality rather than being a function of the situation was a good lesson. It reminded me that someone may be influenced by the situation in which they are behaving and that they may behave differently when the demands of the situation are different.

Please note that I do not mean to imply that a person’s behaviour is not influenced by their personality. People do have ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving which are relatively stable over time and across situations. The operative words are ‘relatively stable’. That is, even though we tend to think, feel, and behave in predictable ways there is also inherent unpredictability because of situational influences.

Awareness of this reality will hopefully make me less prone to the fundamental attribution error when it comes to perceiving football coaches and people in other walks of life.

May you reduce your susceptibility to the fundamental attribution error,

-Dr. Pat