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This looks like a brain mechanism finding to back up the well known psychological phenomenon called The Fundamental Attribution Error,[1] "the tendency to overe
by tokenadult 11y ago
This looks like a brain mechanism finding to back up the well known psychological phenomenon called The Fundamental Attribution Error,[1] "the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior." Simply put, we observe other people's noticeable behavior in social situations (which is most likely to be their BAD behavior, which gains more notice) as reflecting their (bad) character, while we figure that most of our own behavior toward other people is the best we can do under the circumstances. I've seen plenty of examples of this here on Hacker News, and if I acknowledge the research findings, I have to acknowledge that I've provided more than a few examples of that kind of behavior here on Hacker News over the years.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/real-men-dont-write-blogs/201406/why-we-dont-give-each-other-break https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/real-men-dont-write-blo...
- danmaz74 11y agoMore specifically, the Fundamental Attribution Error says that the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation works when judging other people's behavior; instead, when judging our own behavior, we tend to overestimate the effect of the situation, and underestimate that of our own disposition/personality. It would be interesting if they could add to the experiment cases where people had to judge themselves - but I guess it would be much more difficult to find a repeatable test for that.
- glormph 11y agoThanks for this, explains my own behaviour too. Only after I reached my thirties I became more thoughtful and analytical before speaking and with that came less blaming. It's still in my brain though but it doesn't come out much.