Fundamental Attribution Error: pigeonholing people.

An unconscious tendency to believe that people act because of their internal characteristics.

Cognitive psychology has long observed the extent to which we manipulate our interpretation of reality to fit our schemes. Not only do we not perceive things as they are, but 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 for the behavior of others. about the behavior of others.

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a persistent tendency to attributing people's actions primarily to their internal characteristics.The idea is that we should be aware of the context in which they act, such as their personality or their intelligence, and not the context in which they act, regardless of the situation. This idea is something that would scandalize behavioral psychologists, but which is widely used in our day-to-day life in an automatic way.

It is a tendency that reflects an essentialist way of thinkingIt is the "essence" of oneself, something that we carry within us and that exists independently of everything else, that 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 does not run the other way around: the external does not influence the psyche of people, it simply receives what comes out of it.

Simplifying reality

If there is one thing 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 she is a complainer. If someone likes to meet people, it is because she is sociable and extraverted.

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 we use to unify under a single concept a bunch of actions that we relate to an abstract idea, joy; however, we do not use it only to talk about those actions, but we take it for granted that joy is an object located within the person and that it participates in the psychological mechanisms that lead him or her to behave this way.

Thus, "joyful" has gone from being a word that describes behaviors to 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 for simplifying reality precisely because it makes use of circular reasoning and the request of principle: given that a person can be fitted into a certain category, everything he or she does will be interpreted as a manifestation of that category. That which we understand to be the essence of a person will almost always be self-confirming..

Interestingly, the Fundamental Error of Attribution 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 will attribute this to his or her lazy or absent-minded character, while if one day we take an exam without having prepared the syllabus, we will get lost in all sorts of details about what has happened to us in recent weeks in order to qualify what has happened and minimize the responsibility we have had for it.

Essentialism is resorted to when gathering information about the complicated web of facts that influence an action is too costly, but when it comes to judging our actions, we have a lot of information at our disposal. when it comes to judging our actions, we have much more information at our disposalWe can afford not to fall into the Fundamental Attribution Error and 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 an essentialist way of reasoning. 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 he or she deserves.

Here, too, we see an overemphasis on the importance of internal or individual aspects, such as willpower, self-esteem, self-confidence and self-confidence.such as willpower, preferences and personality, at the expense of minimizing contextual elements: whether you are born in one country or another or whether your parents have offered you more or fewer resources, the person you become basically depends on you (an idea that can be refuted simply by looking at the way 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 cheating, unreliable, and that in any situation this will be the case.

From the Just World Theory it is understood that one will tend to justify the precarious situation of someone who steals 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 the psychological and behavioral aspects of the individual's life. on psychological and behavioral aspects.