I’m still primed by reading The Elephant in the Brain, so I want to put forward the straightforward Hansonian hypothesis that the fundamental attribution error is mostly a social strategy as opposed to mostly a cognitive error: if your goal is to make yourself look good and others look bad, of course you want to explain your successes and their failures as the result of intrinsic facts, which maximally increases your ally value and maximally decreases theirs. And you want to explain your failures and their successes as the result of extrinsic factors, which minimally decreases your ally value and minimally increases theirs.
(Keeping in mind social strategies being mostly unconscious, etc., I’m not trying to say that people are explicitly thinking like this)
I think I mostly agree, except to say that I think something can be both a social strategy and a cognitive error. The question is whether that social strategy actually leads to the outcome we want, if not then I think it’s fair to call it a cognitive error. Arguable all cognitive errors are social (or just general) strategies under certain conditions.
I’m still primed by reading The Elephant in the Brain, so I want to put forward the straightforward Hansonian hypothesis that the fundamental attribution error is mostly a social strategy as opposed to mostly a cognitive error: if your goal is to make yourself look good and others look bad, of course you want to explain your successes and their failures as the result of intrinsic facts, which maximally increases your ally value and maximally decreases theirs. And you want to explain your failures and their successes as the result of extrinsic factors, which minimally decreases your ally value and minimally increases theirs.
(Keeping in mind social strategies being mostly unconscious, etc., I’m not trying to say that people are explicitly thinking like this)
I think I mostly agree, except to say that I think something can be both a social strategy and a cognitive error. The question is whether that social strategy actually leads to the outcome we want, if not then I think it’s fair to call it a cognitive error. Arguable all cognitive errors are social (or just general) strategies under certain conditions.
Well, the question of what “we want” means is also quite tricky, though.