Lee Ross and the “Fundamental Attribution Error”
nonzero.substack.com
nonzero.substack.com
Attribution Error gets doubly dangerous when combined with another cognitive bias, the Out-group Homogeneity Effect[0], which leads to the Group Attribution Error.[1]
This latter error leads people into thinking the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, so "When someone in my tribe does something bad, they're not really in my tribe (No True Scotsman / it's a false flag)" whereas "When someone in the other tribe does something bad, that proves that everyone in that tribe deserves to be punished".
I think the author is not exaggerating by suggesting that solving Attribution Error could dramatically change the outcome of human civilisation, but just identifying it as a problem isn't even half the battle. Perhaps the best we can do for now is develop some sort of polite shorthand for saying "You might be Attribution Erroring", which can be used for calling out bad news reporting, bad social media posts, and unhelpful framing of issues when people are having conversations. Then we need to train our brains to always be looking out for this problem, like a bad "code smell" when doing a code review.
The other 10% is confirmation bias.
In truth all groups of road users consistently disobey traffic laws, the laws worth breaking just differ from vehicle to vehicle. It's easiest to condemn those that break laws that you aren't breaking, even if you yourself are no less innocent.
Also, a cyclist violating the law is much less dangerous than a driver doing so, the latter has over a hundred times the kinetic energy. So a cyclist might feel that those laws shouldn't apply to them.
The thing is, most traffic laws are designed to keep drivers safe. They’re also designed for cars. Bicycles aren’t cars, and car drivers tend to be impatient and don’t pay attention, so we have to adjust—-which sometimes means, for example, running the red light a couple of seconds before it turns green. Or turning left on a red light, since I’m not crossing any lanes. Or treating a stop sign as a “slow” sign.
(This is a left-side driving country.)
All of that is necessary to keep my life expectancy up. As for the pedestrians, well, unlike a car I’m perfectly capable of spotting their existence. Nor is a slow-moving bike particularly dangerous.
Aside from attribution errors, it could just be a political play to push responsibility of the behavior of certain individuals on groups. That is a common and deliberate political strategy that happens without anyone making an error.
Does that not describe both of our political parties?
FWIW, we tried this against (what is now know as) political correctness, and now I'm starting to see people actively defend political-correctness-as-such. Not saying it can't work, but it might be important to make sure it's a impolite shorthand. Other than that, though, this sounds like a good idea.
What happens if your fundamental attributions grow up from proximate personal narratives into a social philosophy?
Perhaps one where you understand yourself as some worthy ingroup whose shortcomings are primarily functions of imposed circumstance, with the shortcomings of outsiders primarily being functions of their character failings?
(Yes, you can see that in your political opposition! Congratulations. I won't say it's equally distributed across political spectra, since I think it's plausible that there are camps which are more widely concerned about circumstance over individual character and addressing systematic issues that contribute to circumstance. But if you can't see some form of this in the political affiliations you identify with, then you may not have truly grasped the fundamental attribution error dynamic yet.)
> Perhaps one where you understand yourself as some worthy ingroup whose shortcomings are primarily functions of imposed circumstance, with the shortcomings of outsiders primarily being functions of their character failings?
If other people in the ingroup you identify share this identity, then, congratulations, you are now part of a human tribe.
The GP even says as much.
It could cause conflicts with those that don't use the same axioms.
However I see a missing element in the usual commentary. The error (or bias) goes both ways, yet only one is emphasised. To quote the article: "most people don’t take the power of circumstance seriously enough" (in regards to understanding other people). This bodes well with the popular notions that "We are all the same", and "Everyone can do anything if just given the chance".
Yet the flip side is also valid: Not taking into account the power of disposition when looking at one self (or one's tribe). For example, the reason I just cut in line is because I am, at least somewhat, generally a jerk. This obviously is a harder pill to swallow and perhaps more fatalistic, but perhaps just as important to increasing world (and inner) peace: I should give Others a break, not only because they might be faced with circumstances that I perhaps am not, but equally because I might actually be just as much of an a*hole as I perceive them to be.
The research doesn’t support this though. Behavior seems to be mostly a function of the social context, as milgrim learned. We would love to be snowflakes but we are all pretty much the same.
I think programming as a discipline is chock full of examples of attribution error. When I think back to the less experienced version of myself, or even the current version of myself on a bad day/intellectually lazy moment, or just reading programming forums for more than a few minutes, I can easily come up with examples.
And I can find plenty of examples where I commit this exact error: many, many seemingly stupid technical decisions that can be explained by the context in which they were made, and more importantly, if I were in the exact situation that spawned the decision, it's not clear that I would have chosen differently either. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I can disagree with the decision, and the really hard, important, career-spanning question is "how would I have arrived at the right decision in the same context?"
The only remotely good answer I've found to that question is reading extensively, especially outside of my comfort zone, which of course I don't do enough of.
An even easier way to not act like an asshole is to be raised by parents who teach you to be thoughtful and polite by default.
We can choose how we respond to them to a degree, but we can't turn them off.
To what degree can we choose? That's an interesting question, since the machine that's doing the choosing is comprised of 50% of one parent's DNA, and 50% of the other's.
But we feel like we make choices all the time, don't we?
Certainly, we consult ourselves, and ask ourselves what we want to do. Sometimes the answer comes to us, and that's what we choose.
But where does that answer that comes to us come from? And how does it get into our consciousness?
Do you want chocolate, or vanilla?
Did an answer come to you then?
Where did it come from? And why was it what it was, and not something else?
Sometimes an action is a consequence of a person's character, sometimes its situational, and sometimes it's a mixture of both. What we should do is recognize the bias, and try to weaken its grip a bit. We live in a comparatively low threat environment relative to what that prior is tuned for, and so it's reasonable to tone it down.
But that isn't the same as treating character attribution as uniformly wrong, or uniformly right.
There was a recent post that went into a modification of Hanlon's Razor to "Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by opportunity cost". Another example, I think of the same.
(I don't mean to denigrate either idea by the use of that term, it's just that you need a term to describe scientific ideas that have a following outside of their expert group.)
If you think someone has a fundamental issue, you'll never try to change it. If someone is just an asshole, you can avoid them, but not change them. Similarly if you think you're "bad at math" and that this is some kind of unchangeable quality, there's no point in trying to learn.
With both ideas, the key is there's a belief that you can alter outcomes by changing the situation.
https://www.amazon.com/Person-Situation-Perspectives-Social-...
Indeed, what is remarkable about human "consciousness" is firstly that so many humans spend so much of their time projecting reality instead of sensing and decoding it, and secondly, that they are unaware they do this.
We see things not as they are, but as our model predicts.
Even more remarkable is that so many people find specific instances of this behavior to be a very big deal, often dangerous and believe "something should be done!!!"...but hardly anyone considers the ~abstract phenomenon (all instances and variations of it that occur within society) to be a big deal - it's rare to find anyone in the mainstream who even finds it interesting.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
The problem with so many of these cognitive improvements we can make for ourselves is that they are often cognitively speaking weaknesses. In other words many kinds of wisdom actually reduce our effectiveness. I would always choose knowledge over power but for many people the important thing is to think in the way that rewards them, not in a way that increases their insight.
It only matters because if it's the circumstances, the person may improve. If it's because they are flawed, they won't improve. So everyone thinks they'll improve and everyone else will continue in accordance with their character.
What's interesting about evidence law is that you can't mention prior bad acts to a jury to say someone did something criminal in the past and acted in conformance with their character in the current instance. For example, it's not permitted to say the defendant in a criminal trial robbed banks in the past so he was the bank robber in the current criminal trial.
It is even worse, they might not even need to be improve/reform. They could be an outstanding person in extreme or unusual circumstances.
If someone does something bad, that's a very small part of humanity.
If you could do that one time in one thousand, that person is you.
It leads to design. Who hasn't vandalised something. If hundreds of people walk past something drunk every night build in redundancies, it doesn't mean people are bad, if a small part of humanity in a small part of their lives can screw it up then it's a design issue.
Personally I hate nothing more than ambiguous places to line up, it creates issues that don't exist.
I think the "fundamental" reports to the "attribution", rather than to the "attribution error": behavior is erroneously explained by fundamental attributions to the person, i.e. "he's a jerk". In this sense there is no debate of having a "fundamental" attribution error.
But I'm probably wrong.
Now I open HN and there it is on the front page.
Baader–Meinhof to the extreme.
The original paper tells us we have a general tendency to think it's disposition. It is NOT proving (and it does not pretend to) that it's always situation.
Getting to the bottom of the "true" reason somebody wronged you is not always possible. Causes are themselves effects for their cause and so on to infinity. The big bang might be true cause to everything, but I would not conclude from that that you can't judge anybody as being a jerk. Going back to one of the examples in the article "Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges". Ok, but one could argue that disposition can be a valid explanation/cause for why one is a criminal and the other a cleric in the first place.
Taking the huge amount of time and energy to understand the real cause could leave you vulnerable to keep being wronged while you're in a decision paralysis. Biases can be very useful tool to navigate life.
Stealing is an obvious one.