MAS SELAMAT WINS BLAME GAME!

INSIGHT S9, ST, Saturday, March 15 2008

Mas Selamat wins in blame game

" ... NO, wait... within sight of some minister, who sits at home with a huge bank of television screens, channel-surfing so that he knows everything that goes on here -......There's a certain gleefulness i detect on blogs and chatrooms in pointing out how Singapore's much-vaunted and supposedly 'all-seeing and all-knowing' Government has been blind-sided and tripped up by a limping terrorist's ability to walk out of a secure facility that one int'l report i cam across described as Guantanamo Bay."


We can see that Singaporeans are rather active in the cyber world, speaking their minds without much thought. I supposed that the schema they have was that Government is almighty and it would be so impossible that Mas Selamat would escape, except their comments on net.

When i first read it, i thought the government was rather incompetent when such a short and unkept person would actually get out of the hands of the superior government. However, from the social psychological perspective, the question of why people jumping at conclusions that quickly soon reveals.

So, the foremost question we should be asking is, why would all Singaporeans see government as the almighty? Government although is supposed to be the structure, the body that controls and feed the ultimate accurate information to the public, they are afterall, humans because it's not machines at work. I am sure that humans make error. Those comments made on net showed that they made the Fundamental Attribution Error, where according to Social Psychology Alive book, the tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person's behavoir is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors. Yes, it's perculiar that Mas Selamat escaped when there's hundred of eyes on him but, i guess it's not due to any internal factors such as policemen being slackers, spy for Osama, same fate as Mas S. etc. But rather, situational factors like Mas S. is good at escaping as said by the police, changing shifts of policemen that result in lower attention, hunger and therefore, a slip of attention....

I don't think we should blame on the efficiency of the government. I believe that government in this case cannot take up the whole responsibility in rap of the policemen who lost Mas S. because we must take into account of the situational factors which were unforeseen. The policemen gave their best i'm sure and besides, Singapore is that small and with large amount of money pumped into the military sector, the militants are bound to find Mas S. in no time. Even if he were to limp into Malaysia, with the diplomatic ties that tight, Malysia will lend its helping hands. In Just World Theory, it is said as a defensive attribution where people assume that bad event will happen to evil people and the good will reward the good people. There will be a time when the policemen use a smart strategy in nailing Mas S. down gloriously and Mas Selamat will get his desserts. Well, in fact, the government was indirectly made the victim of those vile tongues. It may be said that the victim had it coming due to their lack of attention and so on but as the saying goes, Good will triumph Evil( Mas Selamat and the underminers).

What the Government is doing now is reparative work. Such as getting more resources to fix deficiencies and launching manhunt, shall seal those net vipers' lips because what those detractors can do were just finger-pointing and damaging the confidence and spirit and effort of the National Service men in hunting down. Instead, we should not have any bystander effect, where the chance of intervening into or even concerning the effort decreases in case of emergency such as the time in hunting down is longer than expected or Mas S. attacks people, as the number of bystander increases, especially in Singapore.

Singaporeans are educated in such a way that they strive for the better. In this event of losing Mas S., government as said by others, SHOULD NOT have let that happened because they supposedly have all the best systems locked onto Mas S and policemen at their best performances. When Government does something good such as helping the poor, citizens regard that as the job of the Government and they should do it with no complaints.


Citizens expected more bonus from the government and they believe that government should continue to do that. I saw this word in The Straits Time before this article and they had this word 'Beware of the Red Packets', something that has to do with bonus giving from the government because of the revenue earned from the GST 7%. i guess Singaporeans expected too much from the government when they are doing good. When the government does something, which everyone didn't like, they blame government for making decision before showing off their democratic actions.


That is related to selective information processing, which we can also call the cock-tail phenomenon. According to 'Social Psychology Alive', Selective Information Processing means that we tend to select what we want to attend to. What stereotypes we have can guide our attention as well as interpretation of behaviour. What is seemed 'unglam' would be criticized and our schema or can we say 'stigma' of the government is so strong that a fair bit of mistake would throw the government into a bad light. I'm sure that Government is doing their best as a granny for the state.