FAE

FAE

When attempting to make sense of the actions of a person, or oneself, our explanations often fit into two categories situational or behavior (dispositional.)
Situational explains the action as a result of the situation that the subject finds themselves in. An example: He drank the water from the stagnant puddle because there was no clean water available due to the drought.
Disposition explains the action as being the result of some internal quality of the person. Example: He drank the water because he is crazy.
F.A.E. or“fundemantel attribution error” is the common practice, especially in the US, of ignoring the situation in favor of blaming the person.
The link I found offers some possible reasoning for why we tend to ignore the situation and blame the individual.
“Psychologists have explained several reasons for these errors that we tend to make such as those explained in the examples above. For one, because we have no other reference point except the person in question, we are likely to make a judgment about the person in order to pacify ourselves. In our own case, because we know exactly what the situation is, we know what to attribute our success or failure to. It is perhaps easier to 'assume' rather than determine the actual cause of a situation, for the fear that it may make us uncomfortable. While these are the causes, these are in no ways justified methods of making assumptions about a person. The best way to understand this is by the fact that when someone makes judgments about us or says something about us without knowing what we are going through, it angers us to no extent. How then, can we justify making an assumption about someone else without knowing that person?”



Rich Grimaldi