I believe the key point of this article is very wrong.
I urge you to either show some evidence to support your statements, or retract them.
There are huge differences in personality from person to person.
When I kick a vending machine, it IS because I have an angry personality. Even when I kick the vending machine because the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row… it’s still because of my angry personality, and it’s a well proven fact that many other people would not do that in the same situation. There are whole countries full of people that would just feel sad, or blame themselves, or just let it go, or get only a little angry inside.
This has been well studied, and almost everyone who’s studied it honestly has arrived at the conclusion that people do have different personalities, which account for their behaviour more than the events do, and which are the best predictor of their future behaviour.
So, I’m going to take (or at least emphasise) the opposite position… “We tend to see far too little correspondence between others’ actions and personalities, when in reality that’s the main cause.… ”
You’re urging someone else to show evidence for their statements or retract them, while countering with assertions for which you yourself do not provide evidence.
There’s a substantial body of work on the bias Eliezer describes in this article, and while, yes, obviously people have different personalities, people tend to ascribe much more explanatory power to personality as opposed to circumstance when analyzing other people’s actions, as opposed to their own. People will readily, say, write off another person as an asshole for chewing them out over a simple mistake, when they would have done the same thing if they had had that person’s day and thought it a perfectly reasonable reaction to their circumstances.
When it comes to analyzing strangers, it would be hard for the average person to weight personality more relative to circumstance as an explanation than we already do.
It’s a well proven fact that many other people would not do that in the same situation
Do you have any sources that suggest that emotional reactions (such as ease of incitement to anger) are significantly different from individual to individual? I feel it more likely to be the case that you are still using the correspondence bias when you say that you’ll kick the vending machine when “the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row”—these circumstances have provoked a emotion in you that you identify as anger. When you see a third party kicking a vending machine, attributing his action (kicking the machine) to a fundamental trait (“the man has an angry personality”) is an example of the correspondence bias. People are less likely to think “that guy is having a bad day and the machine swallowed his last dollar” than “he is an angry person” because we attribute actions to personality traits in other people. You might be overvaluing genetics here.
There are whole countries full of people that would just feel sad, or blame themselves, or just let it go, or get only a little angry inside
I think that the correspondence bias is also displayed when we look at different countries or cultures. For example, traveling in Spain, one might think that Spaniards are warm loving people, because they make an effort to talk to tourists and communicate with them. Compare this to those who live in New York City, which has a reputation for curt, impolite citizens (probably because traffic is bad in the city, and everyone is trying to get to work ducking and weaving in between mobs of tourists who just get in the way—visitors to the city fall victim to the correspondence bias when thinking “New Yorkers are rude!”).
I believe the key point of this article is very wrong.
I urge you to either show some evidence to support your statements, or retract them.
There are huge differences in personality from person to person.
When I kick a vending machine, it IS because I have an angry personality. Even when I kick the vending machine because the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row… it’s still because of my angry personality, and it’s a well proven fact that many other people would not do that in the same situation. There are whole countries full of people that would just feel sad, or blame themselves, or just let it go, or get only a little angry inside.
This has been well studied, and almost everyone who’s studied it honestly has arrived at the conclusion that people do have different personalities, which account for their behaviour more than the events do, and which are the best predictor of their future behaviour.
So, I’m going to take (or at least emphasise) the opposite position… “We tend to see far too little correspondence between others’ actions and personalities, when in reality that’s the main cause.… ”
You’re urging someone else to show evidence for their statements or retract them, while countering with assertions for which you yourself do not provide evidence.
There’s a substantial body of work on the bias Eliezer describes in this article, and while, yes, obviously people have different personalities, people tend to ascribe much more explanatory power to personality as opposed to circumstance when analyzing other people’s actions, as opposed to their own. People will readily, say, write off another person as an asshole for chewing them out over a simple mistake, when they would have done the same thing if they had had that person’s day and thought it a perfectly reasonable reaction to their circumstances.
When it comes to analyzing strangers, it would be hard for the average person to weight personality more relative to circumstance as an explanation than we already do.
Do you have any sources that suggest that emotional reactions (such as ease of incitement to anger) are significantly different from individual to individual? I feel it more likely to be the case that you are still using the correspondence bias when you say that you’ll kick the vending machine when “the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row”—these circumstances have provoked a emotion in you that you identify as anger. When you see a third party kicking a vending machine, attributing his action (kicking the machine) to a fundamental trait (“the man has an angry personality”) is an example of the correspondence bias. People are less likely to think “that guy is having a bad day and the machine swallowed his last dollar” than “he is an angry person” because we attribute actions to personality traits in other people. You might be overvaluing genetics here.
I think that the correspondence bias is also displayed when we look at different countries or cultures. For example, traveling in Spain, one might think that Spaniards are warm loving people, because they make an effort to talk to tourists and communicate with them. Compare this to those who live in New York City, which has a reputation for curt, impolite citizens (probably because traffic is bad in the city, and everyone is trying to get to work ducking and weaving in between mobs of tourists who just get in the way—visitors to the city fall victim to the correspondence bias when thinking “New Yorkers are rude!”).