Fundamental Error of Attribution: pigeonholing people
It has been a long time since cognitive psychology is observed to what extent we manipulate our interpretation of reality to fit our schemes. Not only do we not perceive things as they are, we automatically take all kinds of mental shortcuts to make us able to reach conclusions quickly and easily.
The Fundamental Error of Attribution is an example of this applied to the way we come up with explanations about the behavior of others.
What is the Fundamental Error of Attribution?
The Fundamental Error of Attribution is a persistent tendency to attribute the actions of people mainly to their internal characteristics , as their personality or intelligence, and not the context in which they act, regardless of the situation. This idea is something that would scandalize behavioral psychologists, but that is very used in our day to day automatically.
It is a trend that reflects an essentialist way of thinking : it is the "essence" of oneself, something that we carry inside and that exists independently of everything else, which makes us act in a certain way. In this way it is interpreted that the behavior and personality is something that emerges from the interior of oneself, but that this path is not traveled in reverse: the external does not influence the psyche of people, it simply receives what comes out of it .
Simplifying reality
If there is something that characterizes the Fundamental Error of Attribution, it makes it very easy to explain what other people do. If someone is always complaining, it is because they are complaining. If someone likes to meet people, it is because they are sociable and extraverted.
These reasonings make one of the reification, which consists of transforming into "things" elements that are strictly simple labels that we use to refer to abstract phenomena.
The use of reification
"Alegre" is a word we use to unify under a single concept a lot of actions that we relate to an abstract idea, joy; however, we do not use it only to talk about these actions, but we assume that joy is an object located within the person and that it participates in the psychological mechanisms that lead it to behave like that.
In this way, "happy" has become a word that describes behaviors to be a word that explains the origin of these behaviors and that intervenes in a chain of causes and effects. What we recognize in the other person, the labels that we put on them, have become the explanation for what promotes those actions, instead of being a consequence.
A way of thinking based on essentialism
The Fundamental Error of Attribution is a formula to simplify reality precisely because it uses circular reasoning and the request for principle: since a person can be fitted into a certain category, everything he does will be interpreted as a manifestation of that category. What we understand to be the essence of a person will almost always be self-confirming .
Interestingly, the Fundamental Error of Attribution it applies to others, but not so much to oneself . For example, if someone goes to an exam without having studied it is very likely that we attribute this to their lazy or clueless character, while if one day we are the ones who present ourselves to an exam without having prepared the agenda, we will get lost in all kinds of details about what has happened to us in recent weeks to clarify what has happened and minimize the responsibility we have had in it.
Essentialism is used when collecting information about the complicated network of events that influence an action is too costly, but at the time of judging our actions we have much more information , so we can afford not to fall into the Fundamental Error of Attribution and we tend to include more contextual elements in our explanation.
The Theory of the Just World
The Fundamental Error of Attribution is closely related to other cognitive biases that also rely on a way of reasoning that departs from essentials. One of them is the Theory of the Just World, researched by the psychologist Malvin J. Lerner, according to which people tend to believe that everyone has what they deserve.
Also here we see an oversize of the importance of internal or individual aspects , like willpower, preferences and personality, at the cost of minimizing contextual elements: it does not matter if you are born in one or another country or if your parents have offered you more or less resources, the person you become depends basically of you (an idea that can be refuted simply by seeing the way in which poverty perpetuates, always in the same regions and families).
From the Fundamental Error of Attribution it is understood that a person who steals to survive is fundamentally tricky, unreliable, and that in any situation it will be like that.
From the Theory of the Fair World it is understood that it will tend to justify the situation of precariousness of those who steal to survive because poverty is something that one infringes upon oneself. Both biases have in common that they start from the denial of the influence of the environment on the psychological and behavioral aspects.
