He's definitely compensating for something...

This morning while I was trying to find a place to park on campus, there was somewhat of a crisis going on, so I was in hurry to find a spot and get to where I needed to be.  I ended up parking in the FAB parking lot, deciding that I would move my car once the crisis had been resolved.


I noticed a vacant spot right behind a man who had just parked his over-sized truck.  As I was trying to park, I noticed he was hesitant to get the hell out of the way.  Furthermore, after I parked and got out of my car, he kept lingering and eyeing our cars.

Because he obviously wasn't going to be a normal human being, I said, "Everything alright?" He replied, "Yeah, I just want to make sure I'll have enough room to get out." In my head I was thinking, "Maybe if you weren't trying to compensate for something, you could have a normal size car and wouldn't have to worry about it..."  But instead of saying that, I just looked at him, said, "I think it'll be okay." and then walked away, hoping that he didn't hear me whisper, "What an effing douche."

Anyway, none of that really matters.  I just wanted to complain.  What does matter is that I immediately attributed his irrational behavior to his personality.  To me, he was just another A-hole using an impractically sized vehicle to compensate for his inferior...intelligence.  And if he had said anything to me about my parking job or my shortness with him, I would have responded, "I'm in a hurry.  This is an emergency."

Clearly, I fell victim to the actor-observer effect which Jones and Nisbett (1971) explain as the tendency to attribute our own behavior to contextual circumstances, but attribute the behavior of others to personal traits.  I now realize that he also could have been in a hurry (as he probably was, because his car was gone when I returned 10 minutes later).  And his concern with being able to get out of his parking space is actually pretty rational when it comes to parallel parking.  But none of these possibilities were salient to me at the time.  All I knew was that I needed to park and get into the FAB in order to deal with a crisis and this turd-ferguson wouldn't get the hell out of the way or leave me the hell alone.

Worst part?  He had a professor parking tag.

Jones, E. E. & Nisbett, R. E. (1972). The actor and the observer: divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse, H. H. Kelly, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 79-94), Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.