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Fundamental Attribution Error
- peter_l_downs 13y agoI 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.
- venus 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- minopret 13y agoThe 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-You 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.
- eiliant 13y agoHow do you distinguish between circumstances and the person himself?
- chad_oliver 13y agoBy knowing the circumstances, and how other people normally respond.
- cristianpascu 13y agoThis 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.
- ajuc 13y agoSo it should be: "Judge, but include error bars in your judgament".
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoIts Occams Razor - why introduce variables to explain behavior, when a fundamental rule would explain it? Call it "simplest cause" and it seems less wrong.
- pnispel 13y agoThe reverse case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias
- vanni 13y agoProbably you'll like this post of mine with some good resources about logical fallacies: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113250814961864918365/posts/XUa7J5k3tzy https://plus.google.com/u/0/113250814961864918365/posts/XUa7...
- loup-vaillant 13y agoSeeing those submissions, I'm really tempted to link http://lesswrong.com/ http://lesswrong.com/ material. But I wouldn't know where to start.
- PeterWhittaker 13y agoThe 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....)