You scream; everyone screams; and you may curse this reckless driver who does not respect traffic regulations and does not take responsibility for the lives and safety of others. You wish you had taken his car number to file a complaint and hold him accountable for his recklessness and foolishness.
The second scene: You arrive at your home; your child rushes to meet you on the stairs; they stumble and hit their head, making it bleed profusely. You carry them into the car, speed off past the lines of cars and traffic lights, and cross the pedestrian path that was, fortunately for you, empty. Passersby curse you, and motorists yell at you.
You wonder why these people do not think, even for one moment, that you have an emergency or that a matter of life or death pushed you to violate the law, even if you have never committed a single traffic violation before.
If we look at the two previous regular scenes, we find that your focus is on the external reasons why you committed the previous traffic violation. You were helping a patient with a critical situation. However, your focus shifted to the internal causes and qualities of the driver, who, in the first scene, acted similarly to you (reckless and irresponsible).
In social psychology, this is called a fundamental attribution error. If you have found this term interesting or strange, you may also be interested in reading this article to know more clearly what a fundamental attribution error is.
What Is a Fundamental Attribution Error?
Fundamental attribution error, basic imputation error, basic proportion error, or basic ascription error, the effect of attribution or messaging bias, are all synonymous with the very term that social psychology defined as the claim that the human being generally takes a thinking attitude in interpreting their actions, contradicting their intellectual behavior in interpreting the actions of others.
In our interpretation of human behavior, we find ourselves focusing on the external factors and the circumstances that led us to this behavior, holding these circumstances fully responsible for our resulting actions.
However, when we interpret others' behavior, we focus unconsciously and unjustifiably on the individual characteristics of others, such as their nature or their prior intention to engage in such conduct, overlooking the external circumstances that may be the underlying cause of their actions, which caused us to take the same actions in another scene.
In the earlier mentioned case, we discovered that if we were the ones who crossed the traffic light, we produced justifications for ourselves that justified our violation of the law, which are regarded as positive and compelling when measured using logic criteria.
Fatherhood and the potential threat to a child's life are both valid justifications for running a red light, yet we did not consider this possibility when the other person engaged in this action. Quite the contrary, we quickly labeled him with character and nature-related labels like being careless and irresponsible, as if he had purposefully broken the traffic laws, and we made a snap judgment on him as a person.
What Is the Cause of a Fundamental Attribution Error?
The difficulty in evaluating the vast amount of information that is fed back to the human brain each day is what causes the fundamental attribution error that causes people to adopt this frame of mind.
As the use of the Internet and social media platforms escalates, we find ourselves forced to make dozens of important and marginal decisions every day based on our judgments and vision of the matters and information we possess or seek on a particular subject.
Getting a huge amount of information daily makes it impossible to review and assess the validity of everything that comes into our heads. This leads us to be biased and make quick decisions based on reasoning, which in turn gets us into the trap of fundamental attribution error.
Fundamental attribution error, or correspondence bias, as its name suggests, overestimates personal motives and dispositions in explaining the behavior of others and distorts the opinions we make based on where they came from.
If the source of this data is a situation we have personally experienced and acted upon, we make excuses and find justifications. If it comes from the actions of others, we minimize the importance of external circumstances, which means that we deal with double standards in the assessment based on the acting party. If it is internal, we act with logic, and if it is external, we make arbitrary judgments.
What Is the Difference Between Internal and External Attributions in the Fundamental Attribution Error?
Internal attribution is due to the invocation of the person's internal qualities. Here, we hold the person responsible for the events and circumstances, blaming their personal qualities, internal characteristics, and attitudes.
For instance, when someone gets fired from a job, we typically blame their stupidity, laziness, or inability to complete the task, which are constant and stable personality traits.
External attribution, on the other hand, occurs when people attribute events to changing external circumstances and assert that circumstantial factors caused the occurrence of the event. If I am dismissed from my job, I will not excuse my incompetence or bad character. Rather, I will say that I was having a difficult day that prompted or led me to yell at customers.
I will also blame my foolish boss for firing me because he did not take my circumstances into consideration, did not understand the situation, and did not value his employees. In this case, the external qualities were based on the circumstantial factors of "having a difficult day" and the internal qualities of "the manager's incompetence."
The Role of Culture in the Fundamental Attribution Error
The culture to which the individual belongs plays a major role in the fundamental attribution error. Researchers have conducted many studies that have proven that the fundamental attribution error does not occur at the same level in all parts of the world.
Marcus and Kiatama (1991) found that societies whose members belong to individualist cultures are more likely to fall into bias and the fundamental attribution error than societies whose members belong to collectivist cultures.
This explains why Asians belonging to the collectivist culture attribute events more to external factors and circumstances than Westerners belonging to the individualist culture, who attribute events to the individual's qualities.
The culture to which the individual belongs affects their view, how they approach matters, and plays a role in their bias. Individuals in Western countries view themselves as independent and are therefore more likely to fall into the fundamental attribution error than individuals who view themselves as part of a group. As it was noticed, this category focuses on the context in which the events took place and the situations and events attributed to them.
This difference in the impact of culture can be observed in individuals' approaches to events through viewing paintings by artists of different cultures. The paintings drawn by Europeans often have a character who occupies a large proportion of the image and, in clear detail, demonstrates that the individual is at the center of events.
In Japanese culture, for example, paintings contain multiple, smaller human beings and are found in natural environments, which illustrates their view that an individual is part of a large entity that affects and is influenced by it.
When it comes to finding justifications for others, Muslims who identify as followers of Islam, for instance, hold to the old, wise adage, “Seek seventy excuses for your brother.” This helps the group understand that circumstances are more crucial than personal traits and prevents them from falling into the trap of the fundamental attribution error.
It reinforces the principle of thinking well of others, which the Islamic religion sought to perpetuate in its desire for compassionate societies.
How Can the Fundamental Attribution Error Be Corrected?
Although an individual's bias is significantly influenced by the societal culture of the environment in which they live, it is not impossible to conquer this bias and become free from it. The underlying attribution error can be corrected by following these steps:
- Before rushing and making judgments, it is necessary to pay attention to the information and opinions that are compatible. If a lot of people in a situation agree on specific behaviors, the situation itself is to blame. Returning to our example, any person who drives their car to the hospital to help a patient in a critical condition will pass traffic lights. This is because the person's chances of surviving are being wasted by the delay brought on by complying with the law.
- To correct the fundamental attribution error and avoid judgment and accusations, we must put ourselves, even for a moment, in the shoes of the other person and think about how we would have acted then.
- Stopping at the conditions and variables that are external to the action and delving into the hunt for less obvious and apparent conditions and factors are both important to fix the fundamental attribution error. The driver who ran the red light may not have been speeding, not trying to help anyone, or rushing to get to an appointment, but they could have been having a mechanical issue with their brakes or pedals.
In Conclusion
When someone commits the fundamental attribution error, they are dealing with two situations at once, but with double standards: when they are the one who committed the wrong deed and when someone else did.
Because they are typically ignorant, they blame the external conditions in the first instance and the other's internal traits and qualities in the latter.
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