Fundamental attribution error is something that we see every day, it’s when someone assumes internal factors before taking into consideration other factors, an example of this is say you went out to a wedding and you were meeting a friend of your friend who invited you, when you first meet this person they seem very stand offish and they don’t seem to care to be in your company, our first initial thought is that, that person must be an unfriendly person, or maybe a jerk to say it nicely. That is us taking internal factors into consideration before we consider that maybe we found out that he had a very bad day, lost his job, got in an accident or other things that could have happened that could easily excuse this assumption of him being a unpleasant person.
Fundamental attribution error is seen a lot in our lives some might be more obvious than others, but a good example would be when we’re driving and we see someone speeding, we could assume that they’re just reckless and not thinking but they could have a genuine reason to why they’re speeding to get to a place sooner, if we knew the reason we would find it more acceptable for that circumstance.
I find the fundamental attribution error to be a cognitive bias that we use to assume a person’s personality or their being as a whole which could lead to a lot of people not having a second chance to show themselves in a different light without already being categorized as mean or something in those lines. The cognitive bias is essentially the bedrock for the field of social psychology. (Mcleod 2018) We see this being something commonly done and there’s a lot of people who are doing this in an implicit level that they might not even notice that they’re doing it to begin with. This bias approach is being used and we’re not even consciously aware that we’re doing it because it’s not a topic we learn about when we’re growing up.
Some people might not be able to change a person’s first impression but by learning about the cognitive bias of fundamental attribution error we can see that we should always look at things in a different view and always ask other questions before just assuming the worse possible outcome. I think this is something that should be implemented in high school or even middle school because I could see this being something that can actually help with those being bullied or people that do bully because they can learn that maybe something is going on in their lives that is making them do the things they do or we assume why they do something. This can lead to people asking questions and even others asking for help when they knowingly know that people are judging them because of a false impression or something in that sorts.
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