The Fundamental Attribution Error
Hi,
This week’s email is about a cognitive bias that often causes people to misunderstand why others do the things they do.
The information here is from my article on the topic.
Here are the key practical points you should know:
The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias that causes people to underestimate the influence of situational (environment-based) factors on people's behavior, and to overestimate the influence of dispositional (personality-based) factors.
For example, this can cause someone to assume that if a stranger looks angry, then they must be an angry person in general, even though they're really only angry because someone else was recently rude to them.
A key reason for this bias is that it's easier, faster, and more intuitive to assume that people's behavior is driven only by their personality, than to account for situational factors too.
To avoid this bias, you can watch out for it when judging others, consider potential situational factors, come up with multiple possible explanations for people's behavior, and think about past cases where people's behavior was influenced by situational factors.
You can use similar techniques to help others avoid this bias, but should watch out for instances where people display similar reasoning intentionally (as a personal attack), in which case you can also point out the problem with their reasoning directly.
As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
Have a great week,
Itamar