Errors of judgment and the fundamental attribution error

Our senses can easily be deceived; our memory is not only less reliable than we think but is often reconstructed by our brain to make us believe we are consistent; our reasoning is subject to fallacies of every kind. Given all this, can we expect our judgments of other people to be objective?

The fundamental attribution error (the term is Lee Ross’s, 1977) is the tendency to think that other people's actions are due mainly to their internal characteristics, underestimating the weight of the situation. It goes with the opposite tendency where we ourselves are concerned (the actor-observer difference of Jones and Nisbett): we attribute our own behavior mainly to external situations that push us to act that way. In essence, we tend to assume that the actions of others are less influenced by the environment than our own and that they are instead indicative of their personality. In the literature the phenomenon is also known as the “correspondence bias”: the tendency to draw inferences about a person's stable dispositions from their behavior, even when the situation is enough to explain it (Gilbert and Malone, 1995).

As often happens, our brain looks for shortcuts that let us size up situations quickly without having to devote too many cognitive resources to them. These shortcuts are called “heuristics,” and they allow us to simplify complex concepts by replacing them with information we already have. The classic reference is the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1974), according to which heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but lead to systematic and predictable errors.

The fundamental attribution error can be seen as a heuristic because it allows us to pass judgment on a behavior even without the information we would need to explain it.

The fundamental attribution error has a major impact not only on people's private lives but also in professional settings, because it limits our capacity for judgment and pushes us toward irrational decisions.

In dealing with colleagues, we form a picture from partial information and complete it by generalizing from what we know about them and by making arbitrary inferences (see the article “Interpreting others on the basis of their behavior: correspondent inferences”). The judgment then carries over to the work they do, which is assessed on the basis of partial data because we use this bias to fill in the picture instead of checking the external conditions. Making this kind of error is entirely typical: the brain pushes us to rely on heuristics and stereotypes as much as possible because they save processing capacity. The picture we have formed of people then tends to remain stable and to define a model that we use to classify a person, but that we built on incomplete data. Once it is defined, we will use this model every time we consider that person, without stopping to reflect on the accuracy and soundness of the data we started from.

Think of all the times we have classified a colleague as incompetent without looking into the external reasons that lead him to behave in a certain way. Once labeled, this colleague will remain filed in our mind as incompetent, and we will apply that classification automatically every time we consider him, without stopping to reflect.

The organizations we belong to often lack solid and consistent decision-making processes, and so become sources of cognitive bias.

The most effective way to reduce the impact of these automatic responses is to devote cognitive resources to more careful reasoning. In practice, when we are driving and someone cuts us off, we are unlikely to be willing to reflect before accepting the judgment of the other driver that our brain hands us. The same process occurs in organizations when, focused on many things at once, we do not stop to reflect and use the automatic responses the brain makes available to save energy.

Unfortunately, the damage these behaviors do to organizations is very hard to quantify, because once a decision has been made we are unlikely to be willing to question it, even if it was hasty. Here too the brain supplies us with various ways of justifying our own mistaken behavior after the fact, and if we persist in refusing to think it through, we will never be able to understand our errors.

Both personally and professionally, the best strategy for reducing the impact of automatic mental shortcuts is to try, as far as possible, to devote our cognitive resources for a few moments to a more logical assessment. It certainly takes more effort, not least because our brain offers us answers that may be wrong but are ready-made.

(Alberto Viotto)