Fundamental Attribution Error

This looks like the old "Don't judge and you will not be judged". Whenever I read an explanation about why not judge, it basically boils to this: you don't know the context of someone else's acts.

However, regarding every day matters, I think that we always make judgements about different facts based on partial information. That's the way things are and there's no way around it. Most of the time, a driver running the red light is a bad driver. If in a particular instance he was a husband taking his pregnant wife to the hospital, that's a different story.

I feel like there have been a lot of psychology-related Wikipedia articles submitted lately without any sort of context. Not a complaint -- I always find them interesting -- just an observation.

The very idea reminds me of the bitter joke that when people say "it's not you, it's me", they mean "it's you". And that some speakers have said "It's not the circumstances, it's you," for example here: (http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Its-Not-the-Circumstances-Its-Yo...). So:

Summary of fundamental attribution error: If you're pointing at people and saying "It's not the circumstances, it's you," often enough it is actually the circumstances.

You will be performing "correspondence inference" when supported by evidence and committing "fundamental attribution error" when not supported. To avoid fundamental attribution error you need to take care to obtain sufficient evidence. You have to consider and control for confounding factors, correlation in the absence of direct causation, and sheer coincidence.

The first example is someone running a red light with "good reason", e.g., taking a patient to a hospital, and how if "Alice" knew this she would not consider the "runner" a reckless driver.

Bollocks.

Never drive in haste. Ever. Unless you are trained driver of an emergency vehicle operating under emergency conditions.

Otherwise you are being a reckless idiot and endangering others.

Alice is right to conclude the other person is reckless. Distracted by an emergency perhaps, but reckless nevertheless. (Trained responders are trained first to not put themselves in danger: The "runner" was in the business of creating more victims....)

Seeing those submissions, I'm really tempted to link http://lesswrong.com/ material.

But I wouldn't know where to start.

The reverse case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

Probably you'll like this post of mine with some good resources about logical fallacies:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/113250814961864918365/posts/XUa7...