Welcome back!
I apologize if you were waiting last Tuesday for my email & it never came. I took a break last week from writing to focus more on reading. Breaks like these can help anyone trying to do something creative not burn out. Hopefully, that knowledge & break will inspire more creativity & energy down the line for me.
Today, I will talk about the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). So what is it? You ever saw a situation where a student is late to class & instead of considering the possibility that the student may have had an accident, the teacher thinks the reason the student is late is that they are just lazy? That’s FAE in full display.
In psychology, attribution is how we explain someone’s behavior or an interpersonal event. The FAE is our tendency to overemphasize someone’s personal characteristics and ignore situational factors in judging others’ behavior. As many studies have shown, this is a very common cognitive bias in humans.
So in the example above, the student could’ve been late to class just because there was a bad unpredictable traffic jam (situational factor). But if the teacher shows FAE, she might think the student is late because he is lazy & ill-disciplined (personal characteristics). Another example could be when a classmate might be rude to us one day & instead of considering that they had a really bad day, we may think that they are just a bad person.
Because of the FAE, we tend to believe that personality traits are far more powerful than situational ones in explaining human behavior. So, we often assume that no matter what, an individual’s actions will generally reflect what they are like as a person. This can cause us to make quick unfair and incorrect, often conclusive, judgments about people, without going into the nuances of their situation.
It’s funny because when it comes to our own behavior we tend to do the opposite, observed as the actor-observer bias. For example, when we behave in a way we didn’t want, we tend to attribute that to external factors instead of personal characteristics. For example, we might say “I didn’t study today because the traffic jam made me tired & not because I am lazy”. It seems we are much kind & forgiving to ourselves & don’t often extend this generosity to others.
It’s known why we do this. We make quick judgments in our daily lives using shortcut mental frameworks called heuristics to save cognitive energy for our more important daily tasks. However, our heuristics can often lead to very bad decision-making. For example, we tend to show more FAE when we are distracted (have fewer cognitive resources) or when we don’t agree with a person’s opinion, all of which can lead to poor decision-making in important scenarios like business or public policy when considering a diversity of opinions might be crucial for success. In our personal lives, FAE can make us less tolerant & more judgmental, which isn’t desirable.
I am hoping that knowing about this cognitive bias can help you be a more open-minded, kind, & empathetic person who takes the time to consider people’s situational factors before quickly judging them as a person based on just one incident. This takes regular practice but I believe we can get there if we try.
Don’t judge too fast,
Seeam
If you want to know more about official psychology terms like attribution & FAE, watch this video.