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TheMajor comments on In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: OrphanWilde 03 June 2015 06:46PM

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Comment author: TheMajor 04 June 2015 07:18:39AM 2 points [-]

Yes, people with bad habits blame their circumstances instead of themselves (duh), regardless of whether it is due to the circumstances.

Your key sentence is "This is not, however, the same as the FAE resulting in an average of more incorrect judgements in the real world.", but you provide no evidence that this is in fact not the case. On the whole, do you think that people are ascribing actions to personalities not often enough, as opposed to too often?

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 05 June 2015 01:40:11AM 1 point [-]

On the whole, do you think that people are ascribing actions to personalities not often enough, as opposed to too often?

I would argue people aren't ascribing their own actions to their personalities often enough.

Comment author: TheMajor 05 June 2015 07:32:06PM *  0 points [-]

I was under the impression that the FAE is about judging others, not ourselves. Yes, we come up with convenient explanations for ourselves, when really we should be ascribing our actions to our personalities more often. If you lie to yourself it is very hard for others to call you on it, so such lies can be cheap and frequent. I would be surprised if many people here disagreed with this. I don't think this 'defends' the FAE though - the first sentence of the thread introducing the correspondence bias is "We tend to see far too direct a correspondence between others' actions and personalities." (emphasis mine).

So let me repeat/clarify my question: On the whole, do you think that people are describing actions by other people to personalities not often enough, as opposed to too often?

Comment author: OrphanWilde 04 June 2015 01:05:31PM 1 point [-]

Your key sentence is "This is not, however, the same as the FAE resulting in an average of more incorrect judgements in the real world.", but you provide no evidence that this is in fact not the case.

I've encountered no evidence that this is the case, either. All I've encountered in my research is a lot of artificial situations in which the FAE is deliberately manipulated to produce incorrect results - in which case, it produces incorrect results.

On the whole, do you think that people are ascribing actions to personalities not often enough, as opposed to too often?

Null. My position is that people are, on average, calibrated more-or-less correctly for the culture in which they grew up.

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