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Fundamental attribution error

effectiviology.com

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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.

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.

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.

Makes me think of the Netflix documentary "the Family". These guys take it to a whole new level.

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

It's a form of survivorship bias, but also a case of the common logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Possibly also relevant: the just world fallacy ("We made (subjectively) good decisions so we deserved to win").

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

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....

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

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...

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.

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.

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