A beautiful example from Clay Shirky’s 2010 Cognitive Surplus, which he even identifies as fundamental attribution bias:
Napster acquired tens of millions of users in less than two years, making it the fastest-growing piece of software of its day. Its astounding success surely said something about the culture, and two conflicting interpretations were advanced in the early 2000s. The first was that young people had all become morally corrupt, willing to flout the sacred conventions of intellectual property. The second was that young people were so imbued with the spirit of sharing that they were happy to engage in the communal opportunity that Napster offered. The first explanation purported to explain why young people were so willing to take, the other why they were so willing to give. Both explanations couldn’t possibly be correct. In fact, neither of them was correct.
One of the weakest notions in the entire pop culture canon is that of innate generational difference, the idea that today’s thirtysomethings are members of a class of people called Generation X while twentysomethings are part of Generation Y, and that both differ innately from each other and from the baby boomers. The conceptual appeal of these labels is enormous, but the idea’s explanatory value is almost worthless, a kind of astrology for decades instead of months.
Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly but includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surroundings. Young people born in the decades after the baby boom ended were labeled Generation X, and they began entering the work-force in real numbers in the late 1980s. Gen Xers were said to be lazy—“slackers” in the parlance of the time—who didn’t exhibit the straightforward work ethic of their predecessors. (As someone born at the tail end of the baby boom, I loved this reasoning.) Commentators wrung their hands about the slackers in our midst, further evidence that society was going to hell in a handbasket. (Remember the Gin Laws?)
Then in the early 1990s a funny thing happened: Gen Xers started founding companies, joining start-ups, and working around the clock in pursuit of new opportunities. Gen Xers weren’t slackers at all—they were entrepreneurial! How could we have gotten it so wrong?
It’s simple: we didn’t factor in the environment in which the then-twentysomethings were living. The market crash of 1987 was followed by a fitful performance in the U.S. economy that, by the early 1990s, had tipped into a full-blown recession. In a recession, taking a dead-end job and conserving costs by hanging out with friends and drinking cheap beer are perfectly sensible responses. Maybe this generation wanted to be go-getters even in the depths of the recession, but people don’t behave in ways they don’t have the opportunity to behave in. Once the recession was over, the landscape of opportunity changed dramatically: it became easier to find a well-paying job, to start a company, or to join a start-up, all activities that the former slackers dove into with gusto.
At the moment of their earliest adulthood, Gen Xers were entering an economy that was inimical to ambition, and they behaved accordingly. Then, fairly suddenly, the economy started rewarding ambition, and the supposedly core psychological attributes of those young people simply vanished, to be replaced by an almost opposite set of attributes. You’d think this transformation would have broken people of their faith in such generalizations, but the desire to attribute people’s behavior to innate character rather than to local context runs deep. It runs so deep, in fact, that psychologists have a name for it: the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is at work when we explain our own behavior in terms of the constraints on us (“I didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because I was late for work”) but attribute the same behavior in others to their character (“He didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because he’s selfish”). Similarly, we fell into the fundamental attribution error when we thought Gen Xers weren’t working hard because they were lazy.
Theories of generational difference make sense if they are expressed as theories of environmental difference rather than of psychological difference. People, especially young people, will respond to incentives because they have much to gain and little to lose from experimentation. To understand why people are spending so much time and energy exploring new forms of connection, you have to overcome the fundamental attribution error and extend to other people the set of explanations that you use to describe your own behavior: you respond to new opportunities, and so does everybody else, and these changes feed on one another, amplifying some kinds of behavior and damping others.
A beautiful example from Clay Shirky’s 2010 Cognitive Surplus, which he even identifies as fundamental attribution bias: