Nobody's Hero

Hey everyone!

Today I’m writing about one of my favorite human biases, the fundamental attribution error! We do this whenever we’re trying to explain why people behave in certain ways. Instead of taking the time to consider every possible cause of an action, we typically just attribute someone’s behavior to a personal trait (Ross, 1977). For example, if a cashier doesn’t return your smile when you’re checking out, what do you think? Gee, what a cold person. That’s an example of ascribing behavior to personal traits. But is that the only explanation? What if he or she just found out that the store is closing down, and his or her livelihood is threatened? You wouldn’t feel like smiling then, either. The failure to think that deeply about the circumstances surrounding another person’s behavior is the fundamental attribution error.

A song by one of my favorite bands exemplifies this effect. It’s about a guy who slips and falls while playing soccer due to “an errant heel” and how literally everyone in his life judges him as being a complete failure because of it. They're committing the error because slipping on a soccer field could be due to something like poor shoes or weather, not just glaring personal flaws!

Here's the song:

On a more personal note, when I decided to write about this error, immediately one particular time in my life sprung to my mind. When I was working on a semester-long group project, one of my teammates made this error constantly and never hesitated to share her conclusions. For example, she noticed that I was not in a happy mood the morning the first assignment was due. Her conclusion was that I was a generally angry person. In reality, I was in a bad mood because she got her portion to me both incomplete and eight hours before the due date. Situations like this occurred frequently, leading her to develop a general dislike of me as she repeatedly attributed my negative behavior around her as being due to my own personality as opposed to her competence. As the Decemberists put it, “[she’d] condescend to fix on me a frown.”

Fortunately, my skin is not so thin that I would take her seriously. Despite my best attempts to avoid it, I ultimately attributed her consistently inconsiderate behavior to a personal fault. Good thing only other people make the fundamental attribution error!

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Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279–301.

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