Fundamental Attribution Error: Pigeonholing People
For a long time now, cognitive psychology has observed the extent to which we manipulate our interpretation of reality so that it fits into our schemes. Not only do we not perceive things as they are, 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.
The 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 behavioral psychologists, but it is widely used in our daily lives automatically.
This 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 followed in reverse: the external does not influence the psyche of people, they simply receive what comes out of it. .
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 a complainer. If someone likes meeting people, it is because they are sociable and extroverted.
These reasonings make one of 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
“Joyful” 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 only to talk about these actions, but we assume that joy is an object located within the person and that it participates in the psychological mechanisms that lead them to behave this way.
In this way, “cheerful” has gone from being a word that describes behaviors to being 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 begging the question: given that a person can be fitted into a certain category, everything they do will be interpreted as a manifestation of that category. What we understand to be the essence of a person will almost always confirm itself
Curiously, the Fundamental Attribution Error 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 their lazy or absent-minded nature, while if one day we are the ones who take an exam without having prepared the syllabus, 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 in it.
Essentialism is resorted to when collecting information about the complicated network of facts that influence an action is too costly, but When it comes to judging our actions we have much more information so we can allow ourselves not to fall into the Fundamental Attribution Error and we 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 is based on essentialism. One of them is the Just World Theory, researched by psychologist Malvin J. Lerner, according to which people tend to believe that everyone gets what they deserve.
Also here we see an overestimation 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 fewer resources, the person you become basically depends of you (an idea that can be refuted simply by seeing 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 deceitful, untrustworthy, and that this will be the case in any situation.
From the Just World Theory it is understood that there will be a tendency to justify the precarious situation of those who steal to survive because poverty is something that one inflicts on oneself. Both biases have in common that they are based on the denial of the influence of the environment on psychological and behavioral aspects.
