The Fundamental Attribution Error Post Rationalised

The Fundamental Attribution Error: The error of attributing to other people’s character what we would attribute to circumstance it we did it ourselves. Apparently we do it a lot. I don’t actually have any trouble believing that. I do believe that since I’ve learned of the concept, however, I’ve tried to do it less. I try to take into consideration more often that people might be tired, hungry, upset, drunk or yet something else. There’s only one problem with that, of course, in that it introduces even more uncertainty into every action. Not only do I have to keep track of people’s character, I have to keep track of what might be influencing their character as well!

That’s probably why the F.A.E. occurs in the first place, because it’s just too demanding for us to be able to keep track of everything; or maybe it would be better to say that there’s no need to. Yes, we might be making an error but is the correction of that mistake worth the amount of brain matter we would need to devote to correcting it?

That is an evolutionary question. What is more valuable, the brain space or the absence of this error? And of course that question has already been answered. We have the error, so it would seem that our brain space is more important. Or could we say that we’re still evolving towards a state where we will no longer have the error? That the error was much larger before, but has been shrinking as we’ve been evolving into ever more social beings?

“And now for something completely different” – Monty Python

I’ve bought a new notebook today. It’s thick, has a hard cover and is unlined. I decided that I needed to start writing by hand again. Some time ago I had a notebook full of my own poetry that I had spent literally hundreds of hours on. Then I lost it. I left it on a train. Since then I haven’t written any poetry.

This book won’t exactly be a book of poetry. I decided to call it a book of beginnings. The reason being that since I seem to have trouble writing anything to completion, it might at least be a good idea to keep a lot of those brain farts in one place. Then, if I do want to finish something I’ll know where to look for something to write on.

At least, that’s what I say now. It was such a spur of the moment thing and it happened such a short time ago that I haven’t yet post rationalised it into something potent with symbolic meaning.

In a few weeks you’ll probably hear me proclaim that I bought it because otherwise the world would have ended.

It will probably be just as true as what I wrote above. That’s the great thing about spur of the moment things. They aren’t really rational. The rationality comes later, when we try to understand ourselves.

Susan Blackmore said something along the lines of: We don’t actually actively think in the moment, we only think about the moment afterwards. You could imagine it as if your conscience was running after you shouting, “of course it’s obvious why I did that!”