We all spend time each day trying to explain the behavior of others, and often times, we end up being biased. One such bias that occurs daily is the fundamental attribution error, which states that when we make attributions about the behaviors of others, we tend to overemphasize personality traits and ignore situational factors (Ross, 1977).
When I go home for holidays, I almost always fly, so I have ended up at the airport countless times just in my past two years at Southwestern. On one such occasion, I had made plans to get to the airport much earlier than my flight, check my bags, and then go to dinner with a friend. So that day, I arrived at the airport in Austin three hours before my flight. I checked my bags, and sat down in a bar next to the entrance to wait for my friend.
I waited. And I waited. And before I knew it, a whole hour had passed, and my friend was still a no-show. I was tired of waiting, so I tried calling him, but there was no answer. I left a snippy voicemail, and waited another half hour, before giving up on my plans for dinner. I went through security, ate a suspect muffin from a book stand, and then flew home, very annoyed with the way my night had played out.
After spending some time with my family, I began to feel as though I would not be able to go to sleep until I had explained my friend's behavior. I stayed up pretty late with my brother talking it out, and looking back on that late-night conversation, I now realize that I committed the fundamental attribution error. I remember telling my brother that my friend was irresponsible, inconsiderate, and thoughtless. Basically, I explained my friend's behavior by attributing his actions to a long list of negative personality traits. I could have taken into account situational factors, like the possibility that he could have gotten into a fender-bender on the way to the airport, or may have been stuck in traffic, but I chose to ignore those possibilities, and focused in completely on his "awful" personality traits.
Even though I did later talk to this friend and cleared up some of the situation, I viewed his excuses (which were actually situational factors) as unimportant in comparison with the personality traits that I believed could explain all his behaviors.
I still do not completely understand what exactly happened that night. Whether my friend just is not the greatest person (and I was right), or whether something beyond his control prevented him from arriving at the airport (and I was wrong), does not really matter. What matters is that I fell prey to the fundamental attribution error, and now I will always try to think a bit more carefully when explaining someone's behavior!
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 174-221.
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1 comment:
Good example, but note that it actually better illustrates the actor-observer bias because you (observer) attribute your friend's behavior to internal factors but your friend (actor) attributes his behavior to situational factors/excuses (i.e., on an exam, if I were to give your exact example, the correct answer would be actor-observer bias and not FAE).
Dr. G
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