Fundamental Attribution Error: pigeonholing people

It has been a long time since cognitive psychology has observed the extent to which we manipulate our interpretation of reality to fit our schemas. Not only do we not perceive things as they are, but we automatically take all kinds of mental shortcuts to make us able to reach conclusions quickly and simply.

The Fundamental Attribution Error is an example of this applied to the way we devise explanations about the behavior of others.

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

Fundamental Attribution Error is a persistent tendency to attribute people's actions primarily to their internal characteristics, such as their personality or intelligence, and not the context in which they act, regardless of the situation. This idea is something that would scandalize psychologists behaviorists, but it is widely 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 behavior and personality is something that emerges from within oneself, but that This path is not traveled in reverse: the external does not influence the psyche of the people, it simply receives what comes out of her.

Simplifying reality

If there is something that characterizes the Fundamental Attribution Error, it is that 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 meeting people, it is because they are sociable and outgoing.

These arguments 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 that 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 just to talk about those actions, but we assume that joy is an object located inside the person and that participates in the psychological mechanisms that lead them to behave So.

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 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 Attribution Error is a formula to simplify reality precisely because it uses circular reasoning and petition In principle: since a person can be fit 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 confirm itself..

Interestingly, the Fundamental Attribution Error 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 her lazy or absent-minded nature, While that if one day we are the ones who take 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 On it.

Essentialism is used when collecting information about the complicated web of events that influence an action is too costly, but when judging our actions we have much more information, so we can afford not to fall into the Fundamental Attribution Error and tend to include more contextual elements in our explanation.

The Just World Theory

The Fundamental Attribution Error is closely related to other cognitive biases that also rely on a way of reasoning that starts from essentialsm. One of them is that of the Just World Theory, investigated by 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, such as willpower, preferences and personality, at the cost of minimizing contextual elements: it does not matter if you are born in one country or another or if your parents have offered you more or less resources, the person you become basically depends on you (an idea that can be refuted simply by looking at the way in which poverty is perpetuated, always in the same regions and families).

From the Fundamental Attribution Error, it is understood that a person who steals to survive is fundamentally a cheater, unreliable, and that in any situation it will be so.

From the Theory of the Just World it is understood that it will tend to justify the precarious situation of those who steal to survive because poverty is something that one infringes on oneself. Both biases have in common that they start from the denial of the influence of the environment on the psychological and behavioral aspects.