For example, say a woman mentions that certain situations make her feel unsafe. From her perspective, she sees the situation as the cause of this: “Of course I’m nervous in enclosed spaces with men! I was roofied and sexually assualted at a college party!”
This is a poor example. That she was previously assulted is a fact about her, not at all a fact about the fact that a guy in the same lift as her has just asked if she wants coffee. It was a fact about another situation, but the only reason it’s relevant to her reaction now is because of the way it affected her character. The situation is not the cause at all, or at least not in the way described, and she (if sufficiently reflexive) would agree with this.
The situation is not the cause at all, or at least not in the way described, and she (if sufficiently reflexive) would agree with this.
Causes are a part of models of what happens. Only a finite number of conditions are modeled as having counterfactual possibilities, and the rest are left fixed as context.
The situation is “the cause”, holding her emotional mappings fixed. Her emotional mapping are “the cause”, holding the situation fixed. Clearly it’s the interaction between her and the situation that causes the outcome.
Of course, we could also say that “the cause” was that she didn’t take enough anxiolytics that day. Maybe “the cause” was that the elevator operator wasn’t on duty.
The whole situation combined to produce the outcome. It’s easy to find multiple factors that would have causally produced a different outcome.
An argument over what was “the cause” is just a conceptual confusion.
The argument is about blame and disapproval. Some people disapprove of a man who asks out a woman for coffee late at night, while alone together in an elevator. Others find nothing to disapprove of in his behavior, and instead find her emotional reactions unfortunate, and something she’d be better off working to change and control.
I’m pulling out the “enclosed spaces” example from the post because: 1) It is a flawed example, and 2) I don’t want to derail the conversation into old, already well-trodden ground.
Better examples to replace it with would be appreciated!
You’re making an error of the type (a is responsible for c) therefore (b cannot be responsible for c).
Multiple things have to conspire for a person to make any decision—if I had not learned the recipe from my family, I would not have been able to make delicious cranberry jello mold yesterday. And if I had not been in the kitchen looking around for a desert to make for movie night, I also would not have made delicious cranberry jello mold. Laid out in terms of jello mold, it is clearly a mistake to say “That I learned the family recipe is a fact about me, only relevant because of the way it affected me. Me standing in the kitchen preparing for movie night is not the cause of this jello mold at all!”
I’m not making that error because my conclusion is not “b cannot be responsible for c”.
My point is that if she was to identify the external situation as the (main, etc.,) cause of her nervousness, her stated reason should refer to the elevator situation. But her reason actually refers to a totally different situation!
If in general it’s impossible to decompose the cause of something into external or internal, then the Fundamental Attributation Fallacy is not a fallacy. I don’t wish to make so controversial an argument here, so I merely pointed out that if it is possible to decompose in such a way, then her argument is inconsistant with the view on the decomposition she is supposed to have in this instance.
My point is that if she was to identify the external situation as the (main, etc.,) cause of her nervousness, her stated reason should refer to the elevator situation
Ah, okay. I thought you were actually defending the fundamental attribution error, when it turned out you were just critiquing her communication. Or at least, that’s what I hope. You still seem to be focusing on “the cause” a bit oddly—what are you going to use the cause for?
Speaking of which :)
If in general it’s impossible to decompose the cause of something into external or internal, then the Fundamental Attributation Fallacy is not a fallacy
Well, when it’s right, it’s not a fallacy. For example, if someone eats my jello mold and thinks “man, he must know a good recipe,” that’s successfully identifying an internal cause, which nobody could have any quibble with.
The trouble comes in two ways: the first is when people just do straight-up classification into types. “He’s angry because he’s a member of the type ‘angry people.’” is not a good guess, because people are more complicated than that, but somehow (cough brains are lazy) this guess comes up a lot.
The second kind of trouble is when people think they see an internal cause, and then proceed to ignore external causes. From the wikipedia article: “Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays [...] when the subjects were told that the writer’s positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro.” Weird, right? These people just ignored information.
In the anecdote at hand, it’s totally fine to say “she was nervous? I bet she had a bad experience in the past.” I mean, one has to keep in mind that it’s less certain than the recipe thing, but that’s fine. A “fundamental attribution error” type guess would be “she was nervous? She must be of the type ‘nervous people’,” which is still a well-formed guess but is made by the human brain more often than it should be. And then the fundamental attribution error par excellence would be to say “she was nervous because she’s a member of type ‘nervous people,’ the situation didn’t cause it.”
You seem to be confused about “the situation causing her nervousness” and how that relates to the mentioning of her previous experience at a party. I really don’t see how
But her reason actually refers to a totally different situation!
seems like strong evidence for the “cause” (I agree with what buybuydandavis says above about the use of the word in this situation) being the woman in question.
It seems obvious to me that she has beliefs based on her experience at the party that make the elevator situation worrying. This is not a difference in type from, say, one’s beliefs about what a gun looks like informing one’s nervousness in a situation in which one sees a gun, and I think it would be pretty silly to say that one’s external situation was not the “cause” of one’s nervousness in that case.
Saying “character” here seems to be victim-blaming (which is a situation-specific way of saying “fundamental attribution error”). She has a map of the world, which has been updated on her experiences.
For it to be “victim blaming” she would have to be a victim. But we’re discussing her nervousness. Is she a victim of her nerves? If so, then I’m correct in the grandparent. If not, she’s not a victim, so it can’t be victim-blaming.
If her behaviour was of rational updating, she’d say “Of course I’m nervous in enclosed spaces with men! I was roofied and sexually assualted at a college party, which caused me to alter my beliefs about the frequency of assults in totally different circumstances!” As she didn’t say this, her behaviour is far more similar to that of System-1 aversion. Other people would not feel nervous in the same situation; she’d feel nervous in a great many situations. The issue is with her, not the situation.
I don’t think it’s valid to call an observation of a particular person’s reaction to a particular type of situation a fundamental attribution error.
The fundamental attribution error is in predicting the reaction in more types of situations than it appears, not in accurately identifying that the reaction appears in the types of situations that it does for that person. That map of the world in her head is her map, and accurately describing that map is not an error of any kind.
Is it this particular example that is the source of your disagreement, or do you disagree with the wider point? If I removed the “enclosed space” example, and only left the “bad at computers” example, would you find the point valid? If so, I’ll remove the “enclosed space” example as flawed.
Could you steelman the point and think of any relevant and valid examples of Ultimate Attribution Error?
If the woman said something like “anyone would be nervous in enclosed spaces with men” it would be closer. Unfortunately, this utterance is also clearly false, so this would be more like a case of Ultimate Attribution Success. I guess you could change the example so that the guy was armed, wearing gang tattoos, listening to rap music, etc.
Based on this response, I think we are talking past each other, about completely different things. To clarify my own point: The example was NOT about the woman applying UAE to the man on the elevator. The UAE I was talking about was in the next paragraph:
when men see women complaining about feeling unsafe, or not being as good with computers, they are more likely to attribute these to factors about the women’s personalities. “She’s just overly sensitive”, or “she’s not good at computers.”
Nope, we’re talking about the same thing. I only make the elevator more threatening in order to make her, situation-based, view more credible. Otherwise, it’s clear the she is wrong—it is not the case that anyone would be nervous in such scenarios—and thus that the men judging her later are committing no fallacy.
I objected to a specific example, and even (replying to daenerys) offered a new example that made exactly the same point in such a way as to avoid the criticism. I’m not making any points about gender at all. All the arguments work just as well (or badly) if you reverse the genders. I think you’re being unfair.
This is a poor example. That she was previously assulted is a fact about her, not at all a fact about the fact that a guy in the same lift as her has just asked if she wants coffee. It was a fact about another situation, but the only reason it’s relevant to her reaction now is because of the way it affected her character. The situation is not the cause at all, or at least not in the way described, and she (if sufficiently reflexive) would agree with this.
Causes are a part of models of what happens. Only a finite number of conditions are modeled as having counterfactual possibilities, and the rest are left fixed as context.
The situation is “the cause”, holding her emotional mappings fixed. Her emotional mapping are “the cause”, holding the situation fixed. Clearly it’s the interaction between her and the situation that causes the outcome.
Of course, we could also say that “the cause” was that she didn’t take enough anxiolytics that day. Maybe “the cause” was that the elevator operator wasn’t on duty.
The whole situation combined to produce the outcome. It’s easy to find multiple factors that would have causally produced a different outcome.
An argument over what was “the cause” is just a conceptual confusion.
The argument is about blame and disapproval. Some people disapprove of a man who asks out a woman for coffee late at night, while alone together in an elevator. Others find nothing to disapprove of in his behavior, and instead find her emotional reactions unfortunate, and something she’d be better off working to change and control.
I’m pulling out the “enclosed spaces” example from the post because: 1) It is a flawed example, and 2) I don’t want to derail the conversation into old, already well-trodden ground.
Better examples to replace it with would be appreciated!
There is enough mutual information between these situations that it’s not an error to connect them to some extent.
You’re making an error of the type (a is responsible for c) therefore (b cannot be responsible for c).
Multiple things have to conspire for a person to make any decision—if I had not learned the recipe from my family, I would not have been able to make delicious cranberry jello mold yesterday. And if I had not been in the kitchen looking around for a desert to make for movie night, I also would not have made delicious cranberry jello mold. Laid out in terms of jello mold, it is clearly a mistake to say “That I learned the family recipe is a fact about me, only relevant because of the way it affected me. Me standing in the kitchen preparing for movie night is not the cause of this jello mold at all!”
I’m not making that error because my conclusion is not “b cannot be responsible for c”.
My point is that if she was to identify the external situation as the (main, etc.,) cause of her nervousness, her stated reason should refer to the elevator situation. But her reason actually refers to a totally different situation!
If in general it’s impossible to decompose the cause of something into external or internal, then the Fundamental Attributation Fallacy is not a fallacy. I don’t wish to make so controversial an argument here, so I merely pointed out that if it is possible to decompose in such a way, then her argument is inconsistant with the view on the decomposition she is supposed to have in this instance.
Ah, okay. I thought you were actually defending the fundamental attribution error, when it turned out you were just critiquing her communication. Or at least, that’s what I hope. You still seem to be focusing on “the cause” a bit oddly—what are you going to use the cause for?
Speaking of which :)
Well, when it’s right, it’s not a fallacy. For example, if someone eats my jello mold and thinks “man, he must know a good recipe,” that’s successfully identifying an internal cause, which nobody could have any quibble with.
The trouble comes in two ways: the first is when people just do straight-up classification into types. “He’s angry because he’s a member of the type ‘angry people.’” is not a good guess, because people are more complicated than that, but somehow (cough brains are lazy) this guess comes up a lot.
The second kind of trouble is when people think they see an internal cause, and then proceed to ignore external causes. From the wikipedia article: “Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays [...] when the subjects were told that the writer’s positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro.” Weird, right? These people just ignored information.
In the anecdote at hand, it’s totally fine to say “she was nervous? I bet she had a bad experience in the past.” I mean, one has to keep in mind that it’s less certain than the recipe thing, but that’s fine. A “fundamental attribution error” type guess would be “she was nervous? She must be of the type ‘nervous people’,” which is still a well-formed guess but is made by the human brain more often than it should be. And then the fundamental attribution error par excellence would be to say “she was nervous because she’s a member of type ‘nervous people,’ the situation didn’t cause it.”
You seem to be confused about “the situation causing her nervousness” and how that relates to the mentioning of her previous experience at a party. I really don’t see how
seems like strong evidence for the “cause” (I agree with what buybuydandavis says above about the use of the word in this situation) being the woman in question.
It seems obvious to me that she has beliefs based on her experience at the party that make the elevator situation worrying. This is not a difference in type from, say, one’s beliefs about what a gun looks like informing one’s nervousness in a situation in which one sees a gun, and I think it would be pretty silly to say that one’s external situation was not the “cause” of one’s nervousness in that case.
The problem is that her beliefs are inaccurate.
Saying “character” here seems to be victim-blaming (which is a situation-specific way of saying “fundamental attribution error”). She has a map of the world, which has been updated on her experiences.
For it to be “victim blaming” she would have to be a victim. But we’re discussing her nervousness. Is she a victim of her nerves? If so, then I’m correct in the grandparent. If not, she’s not a victim, so it can’t be victim-blaming.
If her behaviour was of rational updating, she’d say “Of course I’m nervous in enclosed spaces with men! I was roofied and sexually assualted at a college party, which caused me to alter my beliefs about the frequency of assults in totally different circumstances!” As she didn’t say this, her behaviour is far more similar to that of System-1 aversion. Other people would not feel nervous in the same situation; she’d feel nervous in a great many situations. The issue is with her, not the situation.
What makes you think the situation is totally different? You’re extracting a different set of signals from the data.
I can’t think of a clearer expression of what fundamental attribution error feels like from the inside.
I don’t think it’s valid to call an observation of a particular person’s reaction to a particular type of situation a fundamental attribution error.
The fundamental attribution error is in predicting the reaction in more types of situations than it appears, not in accurately identifying that the reaction appears in the types of situations that it does for that person. That map of the world in her head is her map, and accurately describing that map is not an error of any kind.
Is it this particular example that is the source of your disagreement, or do you disagree with the wider point? If I removed the “enclosed space” example, and only left the “bad at computers” example, would you find the point valid? If so, I’ll remove the “enclosed space” example as flawed.
Could you steelman the point and think of any relevant and valid examples of Ultimate Attribution Error?
If the woman said something like “anyone would be nervous in enclosed spaces with men” it would be closer. Unfortunately, this utterance is also clearly false, so this would be more like a case of Ultimate Attribution Success. I guess you could change the example so that the guy was armed, wearing gang tattoos, listening to rap music, etc.
Based on this response, I think we are talking past each other, about completely different things. To clarify my own point: The example was NOT about the woman applying UAE to the man on the elevator. The UAE I was talking about was in the next paragraph:
Nope, we’re talking about the same thing. I only make the elevator more threatening in order to make her, situation-based, view more credible. Otherwise, it’s clear the she is wrong—it is not the case that anyone would be nervous in such scenarios—and thus that the men judging her later are committing no fallacy.
And so it begins...
I objected to a specific example, and even (replying to daenerys) offered a new example that made exactly the same point in such a way as to avoid the criticism. I’m not making any points about gender at all. All the arguments work just as well (or badly) if you reverse the genders. I think you’re being unfair.