It's a well proven fact that many other people would not do that in the same situation
Do you have any sources that suggest that emotional reactions (such as ease of incitement to anger) are significantly different from individual to individual? I feel it more likely to be the case that you are still using the correspondence bias when you say that you'll kick the vending machine when "the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row" - these circumstances have provoked a emotion in you that you identify as anger. When you see a third party kicking a vending machine, attributing his action (kicking the machine) to a fundamental trait ("the man has an angry personality") is an example of the correspondence bias. People are less likely to think "that guy is having a bad day and the machine swallowed his last dollar" than "he is an angry person" because we attribute actions to personality traits in other people. You might be overvaluing genetics here.
There are whole countries full of people that would just feel sad, or blame themselves, or just let it go, or get only a little angry inside
I think that the correspondence bias is also displayed when we look at different countries or cultures. For example, traveling in Spain, one might think that Spaniards are warm loving people, because they make an effort to talk to tourists and communicate with them. Compare this to those who live in New York City, which has a reputation for curt, impolite citizens (probably because traffic is bad in the city, and everyone is trying to get to work ducking and weaving in between mobs of tourists who just get in the way - visitors to the city fall victim to the correspondence bias when thinking "New Yorkers are rude!").
We tend to see far too direct a correspondence between others’ actions and personalities. When we see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, we assume they are “an angry person.” But when you yourself kick the vending machine, it’s because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.
We attribute our own actions to our situations, seeing our behaviors as perfectly normal responses to experience. But when someone else kicks a vending machine, we don’t see their past history trailing behind them in the air. We just see the kick, for no reason we know about, and we think this must be a naturally angry person—since they lashed out without any provocation.
Yet consider the prior probabilities. There are more late buses in the world, than mutants born with unnaturally high anger levels that cause them to sometimes spontaneously kick vending machines. Now the average human is, in fact, a mutant. If I recall correctly, an average individual has two to ten somatically expressed mutations. But any given DNA location is very unlikely to be affected. Similarly, any given aspect of someone’s disposition is probably not very far from average. To suggest otherwise is to shoulder a burden of improbability.
Even when people are informed explicitly of situational causes, they don’t seem to properly discount the observed behavior. When subjects are told that a pro-abortion or anti-abortion speaker was randomly assigned to give a speech on that position, subjects still think the speakers harbor leanings in the direction randomly assigned.2
It seems quite intuitive to explain rain by water spirits; explain fire by a fire-stuff (phlogiston) escaping from burning matter; explain the soporific effect of a medication by saying that it contains a “dormitive potency.” Reality usually involves more complicated mechanisms: an evaporation and condensation cycle underlying rain, oxidizing combustion underlying fire, chemical interactions with the nervous system for soporifics. But mechanisms sound more complicated than essences; they are harder to think of, less available. So when someone kicks a vending machine, we think they have an innate vending-machine-kicking-tendency.
Unless the “someone” who kicks the machine is us—in which case we’re behaving perfectly normally, given our situations; surely anyone else would do the same. Indeed, we overestimate how likely others are to respond the same way we do—the “false consensus effect.” Drinking students considerably overestimate the fraction of fellow students who drink, but nondrinkers considerably underestimate the fraction. The “fundamental attribution error” refers to our tendency to overattribute others’ behaviors to their dispositions, while reversing this tendency for ourselves.
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. Don’t ask what strange, mutant disposition they were born with, which directly corresponds to their surface behavior. Rather, ask what situations people see themselves as being in. Yes, people do have dispositions—but there are not enough heritable quirks of disposition to directly account for all the surface behaviors you see.
Suppose I gave you a control with two buttons, a red button and a green button. The red button destroys the world, and the green button stops the red button from being pressed. Which button would you press? The green one. Anyone who gives a different answer is probably overcomplicating the question.3
And yet people sometimes ask me why I want to save the world.4 Like I must have had a traumatic childhood or something. Really, it seems like a pretty obvious decision . . . if you see the situation in those terms.
I may have non-average views which call for explanation—why do I believe such things, when most people don’t?—but given those beliefs, my reaction doesn’t seem to call forth an exceptional explanation. Perhaps I am a victim of false consensus; perhaps I overestimate how many people would press the green button if they saw the situation in those terms. But y’know, I’d still bet there’d be at least a substantial minority.
Most people see themselves as perfectly normal, from the inside. Even people you hate, people who do terrible things, are not exceptional mutants. No mutations are required, alas. When you understand this, you are ready to stop being surprised by human events.
1Daniel T. Gilbert and Patrick S. Malone, “The Correspondence Bias,” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 1 (1995): 21–38.
2Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris, “The Attribution of Attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967): 1–24, http://www.radford.edu/~jaspelme/443/spring-2007/Articles/Jones_n_Harris_1967.pdf.
3Compare “Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism.” http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified.
4See Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk,” in Global Catastrophic Risks, ed. Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 308–345.