In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

Yeah, I came to the conclusion a while ago that the fundamental attribution error is actually the attributation we give to ourselves. We should really be more likely to see something (EG being late) as a part of our character that we can work on, instead of something caused by outside circumstance.

I think you need to hold fundamental attribution lightly, especially when you have a small sample.

If someone posts a badly thought out article, all you can be sure of is that they don't have reliable inhibitions against posting bad articles. If you see two or three in a row, you can make a stronger judgement of what their writing is likely to be like.

A problem with fundamental attribution is that once you've made a judgment about someone, you're at risk of looking for evidence that you're right. (Sorry, no cite, but this process is blatantly present once someone likes or hates a politician.)

It can be hard to know whether you have a good enough sample-- I'd been assuming that some store staff people were temperamentally grumpy, but the true situation was that I was shopping late in the day. They're much more cheerful if I show up early.

I suspect that the (theoretically) correct approach is to form a judgment about the set of (personality, situation) -- estimate a joint probability distribution, so to say. In simpler terms, to come to a conclusion as to how this kind of person behaves in this kind of situation.

Correcting for correspondence bias means that more weight should be given to the situational explanation than the dispositional explanation, that I'm the sort of person who writes stupid articles that ramble on.

I may have misunderstood you here, but I interpret the correspondence bias differently. Correcting for it doesn't mean you should necessarily always put more weight on the situational explanation than the personality, which your example clearly shows would sometimes lead to mistakes. It means that you mostly don't give it as much weight as you should.

The Correspondence Bias is a bias that, on the whole, helps people arrive at more accurate, rather than less accurate, conclusions, and should be corrected with care to improving accuracy and correctness, rather than the mere elimination of bias.

I think it's useful to think of each bias as isolated. Correcting for the correspondence bias should always make you more accurate, because it's defined relatively to what's true. It doesn't talk about comparing people with yourself. However it mostly might not make sense to think of it this way in practice, since interpreting others' actions rarely happens without some sort of comparison with what you would do in the same situation. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant correlation between FAE and the opposite bias of underestimating the importance of your own personality in how you react to things.

Does this sound like something you could agree with?

Yes, people with bad habits blame their circumstances instead of themselves (duh), regardless of whether it is due to the circumstances.

Your key sentence is "This is not, however, the same as the FAE resulting in an average of more incorrect judgements in the real world.", but you provide no evidence that this is in fact not the case. On the whole, do you think that people are ascribing actions to personalities not often enough, as opposed to too often?

I've been teaching part time at a community center for a while now, and it's been interesting for me to see how the first impressions I had of the various students stacked up against the experiences I had knowing them over an extended period.

I can put numbers to it- out of a bit over 50 students, there were three for whom I found my first impressions to be substantial misjudgments of their habitual character, and one who I came to suspect I had misjudged, but for whom it turned out that the evidence that let me to suspect my initial judgment was wrong was actually uncharacteristic of him, whereas the behavior that formed my first impression was not. Of course, there's a likelihood of confirmation bias here, but since I discuss the students' personalities and behavior extensively with the other teachers, our assessments of them tend towards agreement over time.

Of course, error rates are going to depend strongly on context, but it's nice to have some idea of my expected error rate in this particular context.

Excellent post.

Related: It only takes a small extension of the logic to show that the Just World Hypothesis is a useful heuristic.

There is another issue with FAE, but I am not very good at expressing it clearly. Basically it seems there is a very strong assumption in most minds that behavior that is as a value judgement can be judged as bad must be unusual - that what most people do is "per definition" not bad, just "normal". In other words, we tend to abnormalize wrongdoing. Terms like "he is a sick fuck" suggest that wrongdoing comes from abnormity / unusualness.

Now if FAE says people are not actually that different, it suggests either that we should not blame wrongdoers or we should blame everybody.

To me the second makes more sense. If a behavior is unacceptable, even if it turns out that everybody would do it if the circumstances would be "right", it is still unacceptable.

Thus, we end up with having to say that we need a secular, atheist version of "we all are sinners".

Seriously, what else is there? Either you accept the unacceptable... of pretend wrongdoers are special, different, "sick"... or you say most of us are in a way, "fallen".

How would you test that the FAE leads to in average better judgments ? And better than what ? Eliminating the FAE does not mean only considering external factors either, or you'd have another bias.

Good points. This may be another case where we evolved to have probability-weighted-by-utility intuitions, and where we work backwards from these intuitions when ask for a model of raw probability.