Scientific American Today is the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.
Although it is often called the “holiest day of the Jewish year,” what
is notable about Yom Kippur is not the fact that it is particularly
holy, nor is it the fact that many Jews you know might be particularly hungry today. Yom Kippur is notable because it is really all about the unequivocal importance of one thing — atonement.
We sit in our religious services all day, reflecting on the need to
atone for our sins. However, it is stressed that we cannot just do this
by showing up to services and praying. We must also directly ask for
forgiveness from those that we have wronged in the past year; and, in
turn, we must be willing to grant forgiveness to those whom we believe
have wronged us.
This past week has been a particularly challenging one for me, a fact
that is only made more salient by my recent reflection on Yom Kippur.
This was a week filled with a lot of stress – a major disagreement with
friends (an unpleasantry that doesn’t happen all too often, thankfully,
though this relative infrequency makes it especially painful when it
does occur), dissertation work, transitioning back into a new semester
of teaching, losing a flash drive for a period of about 24 hours (always
enough to give me a few panic attacks). I had to face the unavoidable
fact that I’ve once again found myself over-scheduled and under-rested
this semester, and brace myself for the uncomfortable reality of having
to let go of a few commitments and inevitably let people down. And of
course there were more things — smaller stresses here and there that are
not worth mentioning, and larger ones that are less appropriate for a
public blog. But in a way, it’s almost perfect that Yom Kippur has
arrived for me after such a truly stressful, overwhelming week. If
nothing else, this week has served as a critical reminder to me of one
of the most consistent and foundational facts in all of social
psychology. The environment that surrounds us — those stressors,
obligations, demands, fights, and other situational pushes that we
constantly experience — have a strong, disconcerting influence on our
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. If we’re going to reflect on
atonement, it must serve us well to acknowledge just how important our
surrounding environments can be when it comes to events that require
repentance — and just how often we might fail to acknowledge the
situation’s strong role in our lives. If someone were to judge me for
anything that I said or did this week, I know that I would hope they
would have accounted for the numerous stressors and other dramatic
ongoings that could be influencing my words and actions. Unfortunately,
given what I know of social psychology, I’m also well aware that they
probably would not have done so — and to be fair, I likely wouldn’t be
immediately prone to doing so either, if the tables were turned. [...]
I bring this up today, on Yom Kippur, because if we are going to focus
on atonement, it is worth considering how our ability to forgive and
forget might be at the whim of our cognitive biases. All too often, we
are quick to form dispositional attributions for behaviors that might
actually have situational causes — and all too often, those attributions
are negative. Perhaps that driver did not cut you off because he is a
jerk, but because another car was about to swerve into his lane, or
because he had two children in the backseat who had just distracted his
attention, or because his wife was in labor and he was rushing to get to
the hospital. Maybe that girl had to stop on her way to class because
of an emergency, or she just added the class the minute before she
walked in, or she was actually accidentally showing up 30 minutes early
for the next class. It becomes so much easier to engage in this
atonement process and understand where others are coming from once we
realize that all too often, we are actually doing ourselves a disservice
if our ultimate goal truly is forgiveness. We can often over-perceive
the presence of bad intentions arising from other people’s inner traits
and personalities, when those bad intentions really might not be
there…at all.
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