Fundamental Attribution Error(FAE)

I read this book named 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell, a couple of weeks ago. It is a book on 'how little things can make a big difference'. I read about this term called FAE which psychologists describe as the tendency of human beings to invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context while interpreting other people's behaviour.

Lets see if I can make this more simple to grasp. A couple of researchers named May and Hartshorne ran a few tests on about eleven thousand school children all designed to measure honesty. The results were quite revealing in terms of how all children cheated but all in different situations. So the results read something like 'most children deceive in certain situations and not in others. Some cheat in arithemtic tests and some in spelling. When a child deceives depends on his intelligence, age, home background, etc.'.

Now to understand FAE, imagine about how you would describe a friend or a co-worker. You would probably describe your friend as honest instead of saying 'my friend is honest in her personal life but slips a few times in her professional life'. Now, that is what FAE is all about; the tendency to make observations on human behaviour based on inherent traits and forget the role of situations. However, reserachers believe this is a way of deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior. So, when we observe someone who is very serious looking, unapproachable, fiercely independent and sometimes very funny and helpful and caring we try to reduce the description to one absolute term such as unapproachable OR funny. We don't think of the situations in which this person is while portraying those traits.

The whole FAE thing explains how character is not a stable, absolute thing and changes with situation and context. According to the author Malcolm Gladwell 'Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context'. And also, the author suggests that most of our characters seem stable because we are able to control our environment.

I am so interested in this whole concept because it makes so much sense. I feel I do this so often. I observe a co-worker, find him or her to be so competitive so as to cut a few corners to get something done and I start labelling them as 'mean and bad'. Then, I get an opportunity to observe them in a different environment like a friendly get together and the person seems to share the same interests as mine and is so friendly that I start to wonder if I was wrong about what I thought he/she was. I start to question my character as too judgemental or too intolerant to imperefections. Now, with this FAE explanation it seems that the way my brain works is how the brains of all Homo Sapiens was meant to work. It makes it easier for me to understand people and come to terms with the bad and good in each of us. Now, that takes a lot of pressure of my 'mazed mind'!

Thoughts and quotes courtesy: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell