Both Sides Now

I have been a professor of social psychology at Miami University (in Ohio) for nearly 31 years.  It’s no stretch to say that I love being a professor and believe I chose the right professional path.  I love being a psychologist, which equips me with the knowledge and tools to help me understand human social behavior.  In effect, my job allows me to ask questions about human social behavior, and then design studies to answer those questions. 

About four years ago, I applied to chair my department. Serving in administration had NEVER been a goal of mine. I was happy to be “just a faculty member,” where I could effectively set my agenda and serve my students and the university. I imagined that as an administrator, I would serve someone else’s agenda; up to that point, I wasn’t willing to do that. But I had been in rank at that point for 27 years and felt that I had achieved all of the significant milestones in my career, and now it was time to give back in a bigger and more impactful way.

Being a department chair is an interesting position, largely regarded as the hardest job in the university.  After serving for four years, I can see why!  As a department chair, you are both a faculty member and an administrator, but you are also neither of those. You simultaneously advocate for faculty (to administrators and to students) and for administrators (to faculty). It puts you in the position of sitting squarely on the fence between faculty and administration, who, just by being categorized as two groups, have animosity toward one another. Faculty often distrust administrators, feeling that they do not understand all of the work that they do.  Administrators sometimes feel that faculty members have more independence than they should. Of course, not every faculty-administrator relationship is fraught—but when tensions arise, it’s often because each group sees the other’s role through their own struggles.

 

But sitting on that fence also has a unique advantage – you can see both sides.  You interact with faculty in ways you likely never did as just a colleague, and you get to directly experience an administrator's perspective, who have demands on them that you likely never realized as a faculty member. This dual perspective forced me to confront a psychological blind spot we all share: the tendency to judge others’ actions more harshly than our own—what psychologists call the actor observer bias. The actor-observer bias describes how we attribute our own actions to situational factors but others' actions to their personality, which makes sense – we have available to us much more information about ourselves (our motivations, our desires, our biological needs, etc.) than we do about anyone else. For example, if you snap at a co-worker, you might blame the stress you are feeling, but if the co-worker snaps at you, you might assume they are mean. But if we just stop for a minute and try to take on the other person's perspective and put ourselves in their shoes, then we might be less inclined to fall prey to the actor-observer bias. We might be less likely to attribute the cause of their (unwanted) behavior to their personality than to the fact that they might be having a bad day or that something is going on in their lives that we know nothing about. And this leads to me think about yet another cognitive bias in our judgements about others – the fundamental attribution error (FAE).  This bias refers to our tendency to overemphasize personality traits and underestimate situational influences when judging others. In short, it seems that when trying to understand someone else’s behavior, we automatically assume that the cause is due to something about their personality and not something possibly uncontrollable in their lives.

Being a department chair for the last four years has come with its challenges, but I will be most grateful for it putting me in the position of seeing both sides now, where I had a bird’s eye view of both faculty and administration because I was that bird. I lived in both worlds and had a front-row seat to both perspectives.  It’s almost cliché to suggest this, but I will anyway – what a better world we might live in if we all took a little time to see both sides now. Suppose we stopped in our tracks and expended a little cognitive energy to consider the situation from the other person's perspective. Next time you’re quick to judge a colleague—or even a stranger—pause and ask: What might I be missing? After all, seeing both sides isn’t just for department chairs.

Both Sides Now