
Fundamental attribution error - EndXA
https://effectiviology.com/fundamental-attribution-error/
======
stronglikedan
I was just thinking about this yesterday, without even knowing what it was
called. I do long daily walks, in which I see the same people walking about
the same time. I smile and say hi to _everyone_ I walk past, but not everyone
says it back, or even acknowledges me for that matter. I was wondering why I
still bother to say hi to people that seem grumpy and don't return the
greeting. I said to myself that, just because they're grumpy today, doesn't
necessarily mean they're grumpy people, and maybe they'll be less grumpy
tomorrow, so I'll just keep greeting them as they pass. It was nice reading
about this effect today, as it validated my decision to not give up on them by
attributing today's grumpiness to their personality in general.

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jl2718
Examine any behavior by another that upsets you, including the most vile and
reprehensible _, and figure out what differences in your own life and
experience would make you do the exact same thing.

Your anger has no legitimacy until you know and accept that you could have
been the one to do the exact same thing. And then anger at people melts away
to wisdom about things that can and cannot change.

_Specifically the disturbing trend that has caused so much anger and outrage
today, Socks and Crocs.

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mdorazio
Personal opinion: this strongly applies to startup (and business in general)
success as well, which leads to all kinds of faulty assumptions about what
actually makes startups succeed or fail. Environment-based factors (basically
luck) play a _much_ larger part than most successful people will actually
admit.

~~~
kungfufrog
There's a specific name for that cognitive bias but I can't remember what it
is. I recall it being mentioned in the context of a CTO articulating why they
believed their business' product was successful. Their answer was, 'we used
Ruby on Rails', and the bias was demonstrated in that there's no clear way to
distinguish if that fact was an actual true determinant in the product's
success, but because looking back it stood out to him/her as something
tangible they could reason about, then it must be true by de facto.

edit: Perhaps hindsight bias?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

~~~
SilasHaslam
The Drunkard's Walk [0], by Leonard Mlodinow, covers this and related topics
brilliantly.

Relevant excerpt: "..economists like W. Brian Arthur argue that a concurrence
of minor factors can even lead companies with no particular edge to come to
dominate their competitors. "In the real world," he wrote, "if several
similar-sized firms entered a market together, small fortuitous events -
unexpected orders, chance meetings with buyers, managerial whims - would help
determine which ones received early sales and, over time, which came to
dominate. Economic activity is... [determined] by individual transactions that
are too small to foresee, and these small 'random' events could [ac]cumulate
and become magnified by positive feedbacks over time."

[0]
[https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/907183439](https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/907183439)

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jariel
And this juicy bit from a reference:

"Does temporary mood influence the occurrence of the fundamental attribution
error (FAE)? Based on recent affect–cognition theorizing and research on
attributions, 3 experiments predicted and found that negative moods decrease
and positive moods increase the FAE, because of the information-processing
consequences of these affective states. In Experiment 1, happy mood enhanced
and sad mood reduced dispositional attributions based on coerced essays
advocating unpopular opinions. " [1]

Wait, so dour cynical people are better at interpreting events? Hmm.

[1]
[https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.75.2....](https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.75.2.318)

~~~
remram
Nitpick, but if you're going to cite a DOI, you might as well use the
canonical URL:
[https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.2.318](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.2.318)

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wahern
This reminded me a Fresh Air interview with singer-songwriter Adam Schlesinger
where Terry Gross interprets the sentiment in one of his songs as an
expression of his self-identity:

> GROSS: That's from the first Fountains of Wayne CD. Do you think Robert
> Christgau was onto something? Do you think of yourselves as former shy guys
> who didn't get the girl?

> ...

> SCHLESINGER: [...] But at the same time, you know, people, especially in
> America - I think more so even than in Europe - assume that any voice that
> you have in a song is you confessing, you know, your inner thoughts. And the
> idea of writing from, like, the perspective of a character or something is a
> little bit confusing to people.

Source: [https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826654716/fresh-air-
remembers...](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826654716/fresh-air-remembers-
fountains-of-wayne-co-founder-adam-schlesinger)

------
esotericn
Useful article, but I tend to think that the split between external/internal
factors is misguided.

It's seeking to explain away decisions based on personality as if a
personality based decision is any less prone to being temporary, erroneous, or
that it's somehow a decision of the human (and so can just be discounted).

In reality, the human brain is not a perfect machine. We have a sense of what
is 'neurotypical', sort of, but realistically everyone exhibits symptoms of
some disorder at some point whether they're diagnosed or not.

A disorder also implies some sort of inability to function. Way below that are
variations in mental state that still allow people to get by in a world formed
for 'neurotypicals' (read: set up for less than 50% of the population, so
realistically the 'typical' word there is kind of misleading).

We don't all see the world in the same way. We might see the same colours or
the same patterns or whatever, but the extents of our emotions and our
reactions to them (trained over decades) differ a lot.

~~~
elbear
Well, people tend to believe that character traits are immutable or very hard
to change. So the fundamental attribution error makes us something that the
culprit is rotten to the core. That's why they did what they did.

My hypothesis is that the fundamental attribution error exists so that we feel
less bad for punishing others for wronging us. We don't spend time weighing
all the possible reasons for which they hurt us. We just retaliate because
they're bad and they will always be bad.

