Leadership Biases: Stop Letting Attribution Error Hold You Back
What It Is. Why We Do It. And How to Overcome It.
If I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy. Or maybe I got tied up doing more important things. Either way, I had the best of intentions, it’s just that something else got in the way. But if someone doesn’t respond to one of my requests, it’s clear that they’re an inconsiderate jerk.
Or if I’m late for work, it’s because there was unexpected traffic or something else outside my control. But if someone else is late, it’s obvious that they’re just lazy.
If you spend any time around people, you’ll quickly see that while we tend to attribute our own problems to outside events, we’re happy to blame other people for similar issues. This attribution bias, or fundamental attribution error, causes us to over-emphasize internal motivations to explain someone’s behavior while under-emphasizing the situation factors.
In other words, we assume that someone’s actions tell us what “kind” of person they are, as opposed to considering the environmental factors that may have influenced their behavior.
We do this because it’s easy. Like all heuristics, it’s a mental shortcut that keeps us from having to think too hard. It’s much simpler to blame someone’s personality than take into…
