Why you are judging others differently than you judge yourself
The fundamental attribution error is defined as “the inclination to overemphasize the influence of a human’s dispositional factors while ignoring the influence of situational factors of a person’s behavior.” To be more specific, when judging our own actions we acknowledge the situational components that led to our behavior in addition to our personality, but when judging the actions of others we place a larger weight on their personality.
The short video below does a great job at concisely explaining the Fundamental Attribution Error through an example.
We want to free ourselves from potential accidents
A study by Elaine Walster in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at how placing blame for an accidental occurrence varied based on the outcome of the event, with the consequences varying in importance. What Walster found is that as the consequences of the accident in the experiment grew more serious, the victim of the accident “was judged as more responsible for the accident.” This finding has intense ramifications in considering the way that we judge others.
Walster proposed one reason why this deviation in assigning responsibility manifested itself, noting that even “when the victim is not identified or seems blameless, we still probably have a tendency to wonder if someone could not have prevented the catastrophe.” This creates a situation in which the potential causes of the accident are guilty until proven innocent. For example, if an electrical malfunction resulted in a house fire, bystanders would quickly assume that the cause behind this action was not exogenous — that some sort of factor that was within the owner’s control lead to the negative outcome. If the same individual were to have tripped on an icy sidewalk, however, bystanders would recognize that if they were walking on the sidewalk then the same error could have been made. Walster explains this phenomenon below:
“We reasoned: When we hear of a person who has suffered a small loss, it is easy to feel sympathy for the sufferer, attributing his misfortune to chance and acknowledging that unpleasant things like the accident can happen to a person through no fault of his own. As the magnitude of the misfortune increases, however, it becomes more and more unpleasant to acknowledge that ‘this is the kind of a thing that could happen to anyone.’”
To simplify this, by assigning blame to the victim we feel freed from the potential accident because we supposedly display different characteristics than the victim which would have prevented the problem.
“If we can categorize a serious accident as in some way the victim’s fault, it is reassuring. We then simply need to assure ourselves that we are a different kind of person from the victim, or that we would behave differently under similar circumstances, and we feel protected from catastrophe.” — Elaine Walster
The focus of our attention is supposedly the cause of the event
The illusory-causation phenomenon is, in short, when people attribute the cause for an event to be the focus of their attention beyond what reasonably should be attributed. Obvious harms are created, as delineating the cause of certain events can have massive legal impacts and can lead to these impacts being placed on the incorrect parties.
A 2008 study by five researchers in the journal Psychological Science drew a perplexing conclusion regarding the explanation for the illusory-causation phenomenon. After conducting their experiments, they concluded that “a person’s literal point of view affects how he or she initially registers, or extracts, information from an observed interaction, which in turn affects his or her judgements regarding the causal influence exerted by each interactant.” The study even showed that “even when cognitive resources were relatively taxed and recall was eliminated as a viable mediator,” the conclusion still held. This means that they removed memory or focus differences and isolated the perspective component.
This was applied to the courtroom in a 2002 study by Dr. Daniel Lassiter of Ohio University, which appeared in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The experiment specifically looked at the usage of video evidence in a courtroom setting. Lassiter noted that “the manner in which the videotaping procedure is implemented that holds the potential for bias,” making it critically important to maintain an “equal-focus perspective […] by the video camera.” By ensuring that equal ground in terms of perspective and saliency is provided by both sides of the case, a truly just judgement is able to emerge.
We want to create a coherent story
Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, discusses the concept of coherence in the context of judging the character of other individuals. He writes the following:
“Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people’s actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits — causes that you can readily match to effects.” — Daniel Kahneman
The problem with this, as shown clearly by the fundamental attribution error, is that personality traits are only one piece of the puzzle that create the end behavior. Even if we are aware that this is occurring and make a conscious effort to reverse this line of thinking, it is exceedingly difficult because it involves igniting the effort within our brains. One way of potentially escaping this mindset is to remind ourselves, as Kahneman writes, that “our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment.” By consistently acknowledging that our behavior is shaped by our environment, we will hopefully be able to apply a similar line of thinking to causal explanation behind the behavior of others.
