Fundamental Attribution Error Quotes

Fundamental Attribution Error.” The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.

When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour. People's stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don't see people's histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don't see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context.

People’s inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions, together with their failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior, has been termed the “fundamental attribution error

When did this game of life become so unfair that we blame individuals rather than the circumstances that prevent them from achievement? This is know as the fundamental attribution error in human reason. When other people screw up, it's because they are stupid or losers, but when I screw up it's because of my circumstances.

The fundamental attribution error is simply this: human beings tend to falsely attribute the negative behaviors of others to their character (an internal attribution), while they attribute their own negative behaviors to their environment (an external attribution).

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts.

More collectivist cultures, including especially those of East Asia, not only show less focus on the self and more on family and other in-group members, they also are less dispositionist in their world view and in fact less prone to the fundamental attribution error. They focus less on the actor and more on the social situation surrounding the actor.

Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the “Fundamental Attribution Error” (or FAE for short).

The general human tendency to ignore the effects of situations and to attribute problems to characteristics of individuals is so pervasive that social psychologists have a name for it: “The fundamental attribution error.

In sociological terms, they call it the fundamental attribution error. Basically, it means that when people see someone in a bad situation, they tend to believe that individual brought it on themselves. Of course, there are always external, situational forces at play, but it’s human nature to think it could never happen to you. You’d fight back differently if attacked; crawl your way out of the burning building; wouldn’t fall for that online scam. And, of course, you’d never end up sleeping on the streets. Those people have drug problems, mental health issues, no work ethic.

efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as “experts” more than we trust ourselves. “My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds—he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. I can’t design my own workout—what do I know?” It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. (Here’s your program. Do it every day.)

Our tendency to attribute our behavior to our context or to blame others for it is directly in contrast to how we tend to judge others’ actions. When it comes to other people, we are far more likely to attribute the bad meal to their inability to cook rather than to other causes. This is called the fundamental attribution error.

fundamental attribution errors,”—a tendency in people to minimize their own errors and attribute them to temporary, fleeting circumstances, but to maximize the errors of others and attribute them to lasting, negative personality traits or character flaws.16 It’s an “I’m okay, but you’re defective” pattern. That’s what happens for unhappy couples.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

It turns out that the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation. There are two kinds of cases in which we tend to do this: (1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her

The Importance of Becoming Metacognitively Sophisticated as a Learner Whatever the reasons for our not developing accurate mental models of ourselves as learners, the importance of becoming sophisticated as a learner cannot be overemphasized. Increasingly, coping with the changes that characterize today’s world—technological changes, job and career changes, and changes in how much of formal and informal education happens in the classroom versus at a computer terminal, coupled with the range of information and procedures that need to be acquired—requires that we learn how to learn. Also, because more and more of our learning will be what Whitten, Rabinowitz, and Whitten (2006) have labeled unsupervised learning, we need, in effect, to know how to manage our own learning activities. To become effective in managing one’s own learning requires not only some understanding of the complex and unintuitive processes that underlie one’s encoding, retention, and retrieval of information and skills, but also, in my opinion, avoiding certain attribution errors. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) refers to the tendency, in explaining the behaviors of others, to overvalue the role of personality characteristics and undervalue the role of situational factors. That is, behaviors tend to be overattributed to a behaving individual’s or group’s characteristics and underattributed to situational constraints and influences. In the case of human metacognitive processes, there is both a parallel error and an error that I see as essentially the opposite. The parallel error is to overattribute the degree to which students and others learn or remember to innate ability. Differences in ability between individuals are overappreciated, whereas differences in effort, encoding activities, and whether the prior learning that is a foundation for the new learning in question has been acquired are underappreciated.

When we deal with a person who has authority over us, it can often seem that the person is smarter and more competent as we are. Instead of attributing this power to the person's position in society, we make the fundamental attribution error. We assume the person is more competent than we are because the person has power over us. We ignore the fact that people have authority because of their social position, not necessarily because of any special expertise.

The 'fundamental attribution error' is a psychological phenomenon in which we tend to view other people's actions as reflections of their characters and to overlook the power of situation to influence their actions, whereas with ourselves, we recognize the pressures of circumstance. When other people's cell phones ring during a movie, it's because they're inconsiderate boors; if my cell phone rings during a movie, it's because I need to be able to take a call from the babysitter. I tried to remember not to judge people harshly, especially on the first or second encounter. Their actions might not reveal their enduring character but instead reflect some situation they find themselves in. Forbearance is a form of generosity.

Furthermore, we’re prone to make what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. Research shows that when we observe others, our explanations for their behaviors tend to overemphasize dispositional factors—their personality type and the values we assume they have—while downplaying situational factors, such as social pressures or environmental circumstances. By contrast, when explaining our own behaviors, we tend to attribute good outcomes to dispositional factors—in particular, our skill and diligence—and bad outcomes to situational ones.

Imagine you suffer from insomnia and haven’t slept properly in days and you lose your temper and shout at a colleague. Then you apologize. What does this incident say about you? It says you need your sleep. Beyond that, it says nothing. But imagine you see someone who snaps, shouts, then apologizes and explains that he has insomnia and hasn’t slept properly in days. What does that incident say about that person? Logically, it should say about him what it said about you, but decades of research suggest that’s not the lesson you will draw. You will think this person is a jerk. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error. We are fully aware that situational factors—like insomnia—can influence our own behavior, and we rightly attribute our behavior to those factors, but we routinely don’t make the same allowance for others and instead assume that their behavior reflects who they are. Why did that guy act like a jerk? Because he is a jerk. This is a potent bias. If a student is told to speak in support of a Republican candidate, an observer will tend to see the student as pro-Republican even if the student only did what she was told to do—and even if the observer is the one who gave the order! Stepping outside ourselves and seeing things as others do is that hard.

One of the things I’m good at spotting in myself is the fundamental attribution error: that’s when you assume that your own dumb mistakes are the result of normal, excusable human fallibility, while other people’s mistakes are the result of their fundamental lack of character.

As suggested in Chapter 1, intensive kin-based institutions demand that individuals behave in a range of different ways depending on their relationships to other people. Some relationships explicitly call for joking, while others demand quiet submission. By contrast, the world of impersonal markets and relational mobility favors consistency across contexts and relationships as well as the cultivation of unique personal characteristics specialized for diverse niches. For at least a millennium, these cultural evolutionary pressures have fostered a rising degree of dispositionalism. Individuals increasingly sought consistency—to be “themselves”—across contexts and judged others negatively when they failed to show this consistency. Understanding this helps explain why WEIRD people are so much more likely than others to impute the causes of someone’s behavior to their personal dispositions over their contexts and relationships (the Fundamental Attribution Error), and why they are so uncomfortable with their own personal inconsistencies (Cognitive Dissonance). Reacting to this culturally constructed worldview, WEIRD people are forever seeking their “true selves” (good luck!). Thus, while they certainly exist across societies and back into history, dispositions in general, and personalities specifically, are just more important in WEIRD societies.46

We suffer from the fundamental attribution error. When I see bad behavior in you, I attribute it to your flawed character. When it happens in me, I attribute it to extraordinarily trying circumstances.

psychological bias known as the fundamental attribution error exacerbates the problem. Stanford psychologist Lee Ross identified this fascinating asymmetry: when we see others fail, we spontaneously view their character or ability as the cause. It’s almost amusing to realize that we do exactly the opposite in explaining our own failures—spontaneously seeing external factors as the cause. For example, if we show up late for a meeting, we blame traffic. If a colleague is late for a meeting, we may conclude he is uncommitted or lazy.

The fundamental attribution error, where we tend to read others’ actions on a negative incline which we directly relate to their character and their personality.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to believe that others behave badly because of their personality while we ourselves behave badly because of factors beyond our control. People often jump to blaming others while letting themselves off the hook. Drivers think that someone cutting them off must be a jerk rather than wondering if there’s an emergency or some other reason requiring them to drive that way.

All these complexities point to the same, simple conclusion. The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on. Instead, the dominant sources of individual top incomes lie in superordinate labor. The overwhelmingly greater part of the recent increase in the top 1 percent’s aggregate income share is attributable not to a shift of overall income away from labor and in favor of capital, but rather to a shift within labor income, away from the middle class and in favor of elite workers. The working rich have risen by fundamentally transforming class conflict and then winning the new battle between elite and middle-class labor. The claim that meritocratic inequality reflects earned advantage may ultimately be a moral error. But it rests on economic facts.

To avoid mental traps, you must think more objectively. Try arguing from first principles, getting to root causes, and seeking out the third story. Realize that your intuitive interpretations of the world can often be wrong due to availability bias, fundamental attribution error, optimistic probability bias, and other related mental models that explain common errors in thinking. Use Ockham’s razor and Hanlon’s razor to begin investigating the simplest objective explanations. Then test your theories by de-risking your assumptions, avoiding premature optimization. Attempt to think gray in an effort to consistently avoid confirmation bias. Actively seek out other perspectives by including the Devil’s advocate position and bypassing the filter bubble. Consider the adage “You are what you eat.” You need to take in a variety of foods to be a healthy person. Likewise, taking in a variety of perspectives will help you become a super thinker.

what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, where you frequently make errors by attributing others’ behaviors to their internal, or fundamental, motivations rather than external factors. You are guilty of the fundamental attribution error whenever you think someone was mean because she is mean rather than thinking she was just having a bad day. You

what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, where you frequently make errors by attributing others’ behaviors to their internal, or fundamental, motivations rather than external factors. You are guilty of the fundamental attribution error whenever you think someone was mean because she is mean rather than thinking she was just having a bad day. You of course tend to view your own behavior in the opposite way, which is called self-serving bias. When you are the actor, you often have self-serving reasons for your behavior, but when you are the observer, you tend to blame the other’s intrinsic nature. (That’s why this model is also sometimes called actor-observer bias.)

fall prey to the fundamental attribution error. This describes the tendency to overestimate individuals’ influence and underestimate external, situational factors.

The fundamental attribution error is particularly useful for whittling negative events into neat little packages.

FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

And this brings us face to face with a blunder of our traditional creed, which is radical. It talks of God's love as though that stood merely on a par with His justice though it were something belonging to Him which He puts on or off. It is hardly possible to open a religious book in which this fatal error is not found; fatal, because it virtually strikes out of the Gospel its fundamental truth, that GOD IS LOVE. The terms are equivalent. They can be interchanged. God is not anger though He can be angry, God is not vengeance though He does avenge. These are attributes, love is essence. Therefore, God is unchangeably love. Therefore, in judgment He is love, in wrath He is love, in vengeance He is love-" love first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Social psychologists call the process the fundamental attribution error. When asked to explain other people's problems, we have an uncanny tendency to assign blame to inner qualities: to their personality traits, emotional states, and the like. If I hear you've been suckered by a salesman, I conclude it's because you're easily deceived. When it comes to ourselves, however, we usually blame it on features of the situation. If I get suckered, it's because the salesman rushed me or conned me or I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Theories of generational difference make sense if they are expressed as theories of environmental difference rather than of psychological difference. People, especially young people, will respond to incentives because they have much to gain and little to lose from experimentation. To understand why people are spending so much time and energy exploring new forms of connection, you have to overcome the fundamental attribution error and extend to other people the set of explanations that you use to describe your own behavior: you respond to new opportunities, and so does everybody else, and these changes feed on one another, amplifying some kinds of behavior and damping others. People in my generation and older often tut-tut about young people’s disclosing so much of their lives on social networks like Facebook, contrasting that behavior with our own relative virtue in that regard: “You exhibitionists! We didn’t behave like that when we were your age!” This comparison conveniently ignores the fact that we didn’t behave that way because no one offered us the opportunity (and from what I remember of my twenties, I think we would have happily behaved that way if we’d had the chance). The generational explanations of Napster’s success fall apart because of the fundamental attribution error. The recording industry made that error when it became convinced that young people were willing to share because their generation was morally inferior (a complaint with obvious conceptual appeal to the elders). This thesis never made sense. If young people had become generally lawless, we’d expect to see a rise not just in sharing music but also in shoplifting and other forms of theft.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.