Desrtopa comments on Correspondence Bias - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 June 2007 12:58AM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 28 March 2013 07:07:42PM 1 point [-]

You're urging someone else to show evidence for their statements or retract them, while countering with assertions for which you yourself do not provide evidence.

There's a substantial body of work on the bias Eliezer describes in this article, and while, yes, obviously people have different personalities, people tend to ascribe much more explanatory power to personality as opposed to circumstance when analyzing other people's actions, as opposed to their own. People will readily, say, write off another person as an asshole for chewing them out over a simple mistake, when they would have done the same thing if they had had that person's day and thought it a perfectly reasonable reaction to their circumstances.

When it comes to analyzing strangers, it would be hard for the average person to weight personality more relative to circumstance as an explanation than we already do.