Fundamental Attribution Error

Valuing all the information we come across every day is impossible. Especially with the expansion of the internet and social networks. We must constantly make decisions, more or less important, based on the information we have or can seek.

Since the amount of information is too large and we have little time to review it all,  we usually make decisions quickly based on heuristics. They allow preconceptions to be created, such as the fundamental attribution error (Gilbert, 1989).

Also known as the mismatch, the fundamental attribution error, as the name itself indicates, affects and alters our attributions. Designates the tendency or willingness to  emphasize or overestimate internal personal dispositions or motives when trying to explain / attribute / interpret observed behavior in other people,  underestimating the importance of external circumstances.

The Castro experiment

Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis (1967) conducted a study to verify how attributions work. In practice, they wanted to study how we attribute an unfavorable attitude to criticism. We present this experiment to make the explanation clearer.

During the experiment, participants were asked to read some essays against Fidel Castro and others in his favor. Later, they had to define the writers’ attitudes towards Fidel Castro. The attributions they made were similar to the content of the text. They said that those who wrote in favor took a favorable attitude towards Castro and those who wrote against him were against him.

So far, the result was as expected. Considering that the writers had written freely, the attributions they made were internal. Each wrote according to their own beliefs. However, other participants were told that the writers had written for or against Castro purely by chance.

He threw a coin in the air and regardless of the result they had to write for or against. At that point the scholars expected external attributions from the participants, on the contrary, they continued to be internal. If you write in favor, you are in favor; if you write against, you are against, regardless of the reasons that may lead to writing. Our mind works in a curious way, right?

Internal and external attributions

However, what are the internal and external attributions? How do they differ? These attributions (Ross, 1977) refer to reasons, to causes. Therefore,  an internal attribution is one that concerns the internal characteristics of a person, such as his attitudes or his personality. For example, if a person we disagree with fails an exam or gets fired, we likely attribute internal causes to these facts. He did not pass the exam, because he is stupid; did not pass the exam, because he is a slacker. Being stupid or lazy are stable characteristics of people.

External attributions refer to external, changing and, in many cases, random factors. Going back to the previous example: I didn’t pass the exam because I had a bad day and got fired because my boss is incompetent. In this case, the attributions could be based on circumstantial events, such as having a bad day or other people’s internal characteristics.

Explanations of the fundamental attribution error

There are many theories that try to explain how the fundamental attribution error arises. Although it is not known exactly why it occurs, some theories also present hypotheses. One such theories involves the just world hypothesis (Lerner and Miller, 1977). According to this hypothesis,  people would get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Attributing failure to causes that are more about personality type than external situations responds to our need to believe in a just world. This belief reinforces the idea that we are in control of our life.

Another theory is that of actor communication (Lassiter, Geers, Munhall, Ploutz-Zinder and Breitenbecher, 2002). When we pay attention to a situation, we take the individual as a point of reference while taking the circumstances for granted, as if they were a simple background. The attributions of behavior are therefore based on the people we observe. When we observe ourselves, we are more aware of the influence that external forces have on us, in other words, of external attributions.

Culture in the fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error takes several forms. Some researchers have shown that it is more common in individualistic cultures (Markus and Kiyatama, 1991). More individualistic people tend to make this mistake more frequently  than those from more collectivist cultures. In this way, Asians attribute the causes of behavior more to situations, whereas Westerners attribute the attitude of the person acting more.

These differences are related to various cultures. Individualists, more numerous in Western countries, tend to see themselves as independent agents and, consequently, pay more attention to individual objects than to details concerning the context. Conversely,  more collectivists tend to pay more attention to the context.

A classic difference can be seen in the paintings. Western paintings depict human figures that occupy a large part of the canvas, leaving little space for the background. In countries like Japan, however, the paintings depict very small people in landscapes where many details are developed.

As we have seen, prejudices are difficult to avoid as they are intrinsic to important factors, such as culture. However,  it is not impossible to avoid them. Some techniques (Gilbert, 1989) to correct the fundamental attribution error are:

• Pay attention to the consent information, if many people behave identically in the same situations, the cause could be the situation.
• Ask yourself how you would behave in the same situation.
• Look for unnoticed causes, specifically, look for less obvious factors.

Bibliography

Gilbert, DT (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process. In JS Uleman & JA Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 189–211). New York: Guilford Press.

Jones, EE & Harris, VA (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1–24

Lassiter, FD, Geers, AL, Munhall, PJ, Ploutz-Snyder, RJ Breitenbecher, DL (2002). Illusory causation: Why it occurs. Psychological Sciences, 13, 299-305.

Lerner, MJ & Miller, DT (1977). Just world research and the attribution process: Looking back and ahead. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 1030-1051.

Markus, HR, & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. ‘In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 10, pp. 173–220). New York: Academic Press.