(Posted by Rich Clarke) I rarely wander out into the murky waters of social psychology but I think todays post is something that everyone should be able to relate to and hopefully find applicable in their everyday life. Have you ever been in a car with a very angry and vocal driver? You know, the kind of driver that thinks that everyone else on the road is an idiot but if they ever make a mistake then they suddenly come out with a number of reasons why this is. In psychology this is what we call this a Fundamental Attribution Error. This is the tendency for an individual to overestimate the dispositional characteristic of another and to underestimate the influence of situational possibilities. i.e. a person that trips maybe seen as clumsy by an observer however the tripping may have been justifiably caused by an uneven paving stone. You can think of everyone being somewhere along a continuum for these errors. At one end there are those constantly blaming others around them for the mishaps in their lives, but likewise, the other end of the spectrum there are those that constantly place blame upon themselves and ignore the fact that others may be have contributed. Both of these extremes give representation of a world that is inherently false. This ted video nicely encapsulates the importance of being mindful of both ends of the spectrum, but also stresses that these errors are not necessarily a bad thing. ted/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:24:40 +0000
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