Monday, November 23, 2015

Societal complexity and the fundamental attribution error

I see people exhibiting the fundamental attribution error all the time. From Wikipedia:
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors.
Basically, when someone else does something we don't like, we attribute it to defects in their personality rather than seek an explanation in the circumstances. Someone is speeding on the road and cuts you off. We automatically condemn them with "Jerk" or "Jackass". They are a bad person. We don't look to circumstances that might cause them to be driving in that fashion, say driving someone to the hospital, for example.

I personally see this in a lot in discussions, in articles, in pontificating pundits. I have been wondering whether this is just my noticing this for the first time or whether it is a real trend. The question is somewhat unanswerable as the conceptual phrase was only coined in the late 60s or early 70s. Looking at NGram Viewer, the trend suggests that people are indeed commenting on it more, i.e. there is a dramatic upward trend in mentions in books. Google Trends similarly indicates an upward trend.

Accepting as a hypothetical that there is an increasing number of people committing the fundamental attribution error. Why? Why do they do this? Why do we do this? The easy answer is that people are becoming more intolerant of others. Without elaborating, I am skeptical of that.

I wonder if it is simply that we are leading more complex lives, interacting with more people, and more people who do not share our own worldviews (manners, assumptions, goals, behaviors) and therefore it is cognitively more difficult to extrapolate to people's circumstances from their actions. Creating twenty scenarios that give the deviant behavior a justifiable context is cognitively more taxing than the knee-jerk assumption, "Jerk."

No comments:

Post a Comment