Worst motive fallacy: what is it and how does it affect us?

The worst motive fallacy is a concept linked to pessimistic cognitive biases.

Think wrong and you will be right. To say that many have made this saying their way of thinking about others is not an exaggeration; in fact, there is even relatively recent scientific evidence about how people think that others act more for bad reasons than for good ones.

This idea that was until recently only part of popular culture has just become a theory with even an experiment behind it: the worst motive fallacy.

Below we will learn more about this new cognitive bias, the experiment with which it was tested and some of the conclusions reached.

What is the worst motive fallacy?

People do not tend to think neutrally towards others. When someone does something we tend to judge the morality behind that action, wondering about the motives that have caused a person to behave in a certain way. Indeed, in moral philosophy there is a consensus that the motives behind an action are crucial in determining the morality of the action itself, even if the action is apparently neutral.

Joel Walmsley and Cathal O'Madagain, from University College York and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University respectively wanted to know to what extent people tend to attribute the worst possible motive behind people's actions. This idea, which they have called the worst motive fallacy, holds that we are more prone to attribute negative reasons to others rather than positive ones and, consequently, thinking that people will behave in a way that satisfies those bad motives.

The idea behind the worst motive fallacy has a lot to do with a widespread belief in popular culture that is summarized in the saying "think wrong and you will be right". When we attribute some kind of moral motivation to someone, especially if it is an unknown person, by way of protection for the bad things they might do, it is better to assume that their intentions are not good, that if a person has to choose between helping others and helping themselves they will choose the latter.

Antagonistic to this idea is a popular aphorism called Hanlon's razor, which basically holds that one should never attribute to evil what can be explained by stupidity. This idea is a warning against presupposing evil in all people since, according to this aphorism, what can really happen is that the person who does an apparently harmful action may not be aware of the harm he is doing or that his motivation behind it may not have been ignoble.

However, the existence of the saying and its antagonistic aphorism come to say that it is common in popular culture to attribute bad intentionality to the actions of others and that, with the intention of preventing the saying from being abused, Halton's razor is raised in such a way as to invite people to reflect on their way of thinking about others. Both sayings made Walmsley and O'Madagain wonder whether the bias of attributing bad intentionality to others really existed, and they wanted to prove it scientifically.

All kinds of negative biases

The idea of the worst motive fallacy is actually not surprising, since it is already a classic trend in cognitive and social psychology to propose biases in which people favor the bad over the good.. Many of our cognitive aspects such as attention, motivation, perception, memory and our own emotions are more strongly influenced by negative rather than neutral or positive stimuli.

A classic example of a bias in which negativity influences the way we see things is the fundamental attribution error. People, when we have some failure or inconvenience we attribute external causality to them, i.e. we blame either our situation, environmental factors or other people (e.g., "I failed the exam because the teacher had a grudge against me"). On the other hand, if the failure is someone else's fault, we emphasize their internal factors, such as personality, character, intelligence and self-motivation (e.g., "she failed because she is a bad student, lazy and stupid").

The negativity bias is also very present in situations where we get the feeling that everything is going badly for us.. Our way of perceiving reality makes us pass what happens around us through a filter in which we let the bad things pass and the good things we simply ignore. This pattern of thinking is usually typical of very pessimistic people, with low self-esteem or, also, with a mood disorder such as depression.

Seeing these examples of biases influenced by negativity, the idea behind the worst motive fallacy is not surprising. When a person does something they can have a lot of different motives for doing what they are doing. We could classify these motives in moral terms from the noblest to the most selfish and evil. Rationally we could select the most probable motive, but if it is given that all of them have the same probability of explaining the person's behavior, it is most likely that we think that he/she does it thinking of him/herself with the worst motive.

• You may be interested in, "What is Social Psychology?"

Experimental approach to the fallacy

In their 2020 article Walmsley and O'Madagain expose two experiments, the first one being the one we are going to explain because it is the one that best explains this phenomenon. In this experiment they asked their participants to read a short story in which their protagonist could have two motives behind performing the same action. In each case, one of the motives was "good" and the other was "bad". The protagonist discovers that he cannot do what he had planned after all, and has to choose between two alternatives, one of which satisfies his "good" motive and the other his "bad" motive.

According to their initial hypotheses, both researchers expected that if their theory of the worst motive fallacy were true, participants would choose the negative motive as the motive behind the character's behavior. In addition, both researchers assumed that participants would expect the character to behave to satisfy their original negative desire, so they would choose the worst motive.The participants would then choose the worse of the two actions proposed to them.

Each participant was given one of four different vignettes, each telling a different story. Below we will look at an extended example of one of these stories.

A politician has just finished campaigning for election and has some of her budget left over, which she decides she is going to spend by hiring a computer engineer she knows. The politician does this for two reasons: one is that she knows that the engineer has just lost his job and needs a new one and money, so the politician would hire him to help her; while the other reason would be that the politician needs this computer scientist to send misleading messages to her political rival's supporters and get them to vote on the wrong day.

The politician contacts the computer engineer and describes the job to him. He tells her that he is not willing to do what she is asking because of the ethical implications. At this point the politician can do two things: One is to hire the computer engineer anyway, who will be in charge of maintaining the computers at the party headquarters and thus help him financially, even if he is not going to do what the politician wanted. The other option is not to hire him but a hacker, who will have no ethical problems in sending misleading messages to his rival's voters.

Once they had read this story the participants were asked the following question: "Which option do you think the policy is going to choose?" and they were given a choice between the following two options:

• Hire the engineer to give him a job.
• Hire the hacker to cheat rival voters.

After deciding which option they thought the protagonist of the cartoon would choose, participants had to rate on a scale from most good to most bad the two motives described at the beginning of the cartoon using a scale from -10 (very bad) to +10 (very good).

Taking the hypothesis of both experimenters applied to the cartoon we have just read, it was expected that the participants would choose the worst motive, i.e., wanting to send misleading messages to the voters of their political rival, and that consequently the politician would decide not to hire the computer engineer but the hacker to satisfy this will.

The researchers interpreted the participants' responses to the question about which option they thought the protagonist of the story would choose would be indicative of what they considered to be the main motive for his original action. Since in the end the protagonist could only satisfy one of the original reasons, the action that was chosen presumably had to be the one that satisfied the motive most important to him.

Taking the idea of the worst motive fallacy, the researchers assumed that participants would eventually be biased toward the negative motives. That is, even if two motives were given, one good and one bad equally likely, participants would value the one with a negative sign as more important, which would cause them to opt for the more selfish alternative when the original plan could not be fulfilled....

In addition to the vignette explained above, Walmsley and O'Madagain presented three other vignettes to study participants. One was a man who had to decide whether to take the bus into town to buy a gift for his friend or take the train to rob a pensioner, a girl who goes to a party and must decide whether to wear a dress that will embarrass the host or a pair of jeans that will make her mother happy, and a university student who has to decide whether to go to France on vacation hoping to cheat on his girlfriend or to go to Argentina to see his cousins and learn Spanish.

The results of their experiment were quite interesting since they revealed scientific evidence that people tend to attribute bad motives to people, especially if they are strangers. In situations where instead of being able to do good and bad simultaneously (e.g., give the IT guy a job and cheat the supporters of the political rival) a person can only choose one or the other, we tend to think that his original motivation was the bad one and that, therefore, he will opt for the option that satisfies him..

Possible causes

The worst motive fallacy fits perfectly with the huge family of negative biases, now classics in psychology. People evaluate more critically and negatively the motivations and morality of other people. We consider that it is the worst reasons that drive the actions of others, and negative motives are the main reasons that generate the behavior of people we do not know or distrust, or even people close to us who, even if we like them, we cannot help thinking that they are less moral and strong than ourselves.

One of the possible explanations for the occurrence of this fallacy, according to the researchers themselves, is our evolutionary history and could have adaptive advantages. People, while wishing for the best, prepare for the worst, paying special attention to the negative. Applied to the history of evolution, it was better to run away from what was suspected to be dangerous even if it was not and meant the loss of a very good opportunity rather than trusting in something that was dangerous, making a mistake and risking our physical integrity or even losing our lives.

Be that as it may, it is clear that our thought pattern is biased towards negativity, having very strongly internalized the philosophy of "think wrong and you will be right". This is not a bad thing in itself, especially considering its possible evolutionary implications, but it certainly does condition the way we perceive others, a perception that, if it becomes extremely negative, could lead to problems such as attributing guilt or evil to people who meant no harm at all.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• Walmsley, J., & O’Madagain, C. (2020). The Worst-Motive Fallacy: A Negativity Bias in Motive Attribution. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620954492