FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR :

Stephen Covey said ‘ We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions’. This is one of the many social biases society suffers from. It’s natural for people to try and understand the events they see or experience by looking for the causes of the event.Most times it is in quest for peace of mind. In a way we are all psychologists because whenever we see someone do something we attribute their behavior to either internal factors (DISPOSITIONAL ATTRIBUTION) or external factors (SITUATIONAL ATTRIBUTION). Causal attributions; the conclusions we derive as the cause of people’s behavior affect our thoughts, feelings , current and future behavior and decisions.

Internal attributions are based on a person’s beliefs, values, personality and abilities. External attribution is based on the situation and Environment

ATTRIBUTION THEORY - Fritz Heider 

Attribution theory is the scientific study of how people assign cause to other’s behavior, their own behavior and other events that occur. For example let’s say you send someone a message on WhatsApp and they open it and don’t respond. You don’t even know whether or not they read it. Naturally, you might take offense and think this person is rude and lacks good communication skills, that right there is DISPOSITIONAL ATTRIBUTION. This means you are attributing their late response or no response to their character and personality . You might send another message and they don’t respond again and you assume that they are busy or maybe they left their phone online and haven’t even seen your message. Maybe they saw your message but they just heard bad news and they are not in a position to give you the right response.That is what you call SITUATIONAL or CIRCUMSTANCIAL ATTRIBUTION. It is when you interpret other people’s behavior based on external factors and events.

I always wondered why they call this an ‘ERROR’ and here is what l discovered. Let’s say later you discover that the person was busy and they send you a message hours later or a day or two later? Normally you would still complain and believe that what they did was wrong and impolite. Why? maybe because it hurt your ego a little and you want to attribute their actions to a fault in their personality regardless of the fact that you now have the truth. Which is that they were busy.

The error is that people overestimate the impact of dispositional influences and underestimate the impact of situational influences. What l mean is that whenever people act a certain way people over look the circumstances that caused the person to act that way and rather attribute it to the person’s character which they want to view as bad. This is why people have different experiences of one another .

To establish a fair judgment of situations and people it is always best to understand that you don’t know everything. It’s just like the wind. It might blow and someone’s hat falls off. It doesn’t mean that person is clamsy, it just means they wore a hat on a very windy day. This is why l now understand that people’s actions and perceptions are based on the information they have. Or the information they want to believe. Sometimes people choose to ignore some information or they assume that what they know is everything there is to know. This is called the DUNNING KRUGER effect. I will write about that soon.

Here is a test. Someone walks up to you and gives you a compliment. Normally you would think they want your attention, your number or a favor (SITUATIONAL ATTRIBUTION). When someone compliments you why is it easy to think they want something from you. What if you actually are beautiful? Anyway, l discovered that people usually judge negative situations using Internal Attributions and positive situations using External Attributions. This indicates paranoia and insecurity, no wonder they call it an error.

In conclusion, it’s important to note that Social attributions are YOUR own interpretation of situations and they affect your decisions, emotions and behavior. So why not open your mind to positive conclusions ? This is more peaceful.
DON’T BE IN A RUSH TO ATTRIBUTE EVENTS TO INTERNAL CAUSES BEFORE WILLING TO CONSIDER THE SITUATIONAL FACTORS especially when dealing with people. The attributions you make affect YOU…