Quote

"The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.

For instance, if you've ever chastised a "lazy employee" for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you've made the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error exists because of how people perceive the world. While you have at least some idea of your character, motivations, and situational factors that affect your day-to-day, you rarely know everything that's going on with someone else. Similar to confirmation and overconfidence biases, its impact on business and life can be reduced by taking several measures."

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error

This is a very common fallacy. Especially in an social environment that is built on that authority say who you are and why you do anything and what dirty thoughts you think. If you say stop, enough, and defend yourself THEY will say that you are attacking someone and do not think enough about situational factors..

This must be the most basic cognitive bias creating bigger chaos in our world?

Question is also, some cognitive biases more flawed?

This is why if you want a friend, get a dog.

Dogs are lovely.

Can't this all be reduced to just hypocrisy? Meaning hypocrisy is fundamental to human nature. Part of growing up, which some never do, is to recognize the tendency in ourselves to cut ourselves a break even while we give no one else any slack.

In some ways hypocrisy is a form of "self care"--one of the latest buzz terms I dislike immensely. Looking out for Number 1 is the most basic human mode of operation. Has some negatives effects. How often is one's self care damaging to others, though?

Win/Win moments are fleeting.

There is a great truth in it. A cognitive hypocrisy.

The term self care is something described in this text. It is explained as the reason why some people create a narcissistic defence. To cope.

Howell, Elizabeth F.(2003) 'Narcissism, a Relational Aspect of Dissociation', Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 4: 3, 51 — 71

The Mormon version of Fundamental Attribution Error with respect to your example goes as follows. You wake up sick one morning and thus stay home to get bed rest, rather than suffer through an only partially productive day and spreading your cold to others. But your co-workers only know that you weren't present at work. So they label you as lazy and take the day off themselves also, to enjoy the day that they imagine that you must be having. They being oppressed themselves, want to make sure that you're not getting anything that they're not getting also. Ordinarily they may have spotless attendance records. But everyone watches everyone else very closely, looking for flaws so that they can do the same and use your actions as an excuse for their own behavior. As long as they have someone else to point the finger at, they feel safer making poor moral decisions instead of going by some personal code of integrity of their own.

A part of why I left the mormon church is because of this sticky-glue of everyone watching everyone else in mormonism, mimicking what they see from others and using no real thinking skills, while also never really having their own core of their own moral values which the church tends to strip out of people. I don't like dumbing-down my life to accommodate these "sticky-glue" creepy people. I don't like feeling like I should hide my actions to conform to anyone else's values or to prevent them from going in to moral degredation because of some supposed infraction that they assume I must be guilty of. I have a good moral code that I do live by. I don't want to waste time having to explain and justify anything I do, to anyone else who's business it isn't anyway. I have always given others the same respect in things that aren't my business. But eventally that wasn't good enough. I didn't want to be anything like those people who want to make my business their business, and get the slime of their sticky moral degenerecy on me too.

I once knew a safety expert who explained to me, a problem that he was having. When working construction at significant heights off of the ground, the construction employees were required to wear safety lanyards to break their fall in case they were to fall. These safety lanyards were rated only to hold you close to scaffolds, rather than to support full body weight in all cases. It was forbidden to use them to intentionally support full body weight routinely, to hoist you above ground to different parts of the job that may be difficult to access using other means or to suspend yourself using these lanyards. There were some very similar looking lanyards that were used to routinely hoist workers off of the ground and support full body weight. Many of the smaller and weaker safety lanyards were being used to hoist construction employees to different heights and to support full body weight, because even though everyone was told the rule, many workers were (apparently to some individuals) using these the safety lanyards, to hoist people in to the air using a mechanical means such as a crane and/or to support full body weight. So if others can do it, than "so can I". No matter what was said, eventually the only solution was to forbid any lifting of any employees off of the ground or for an employee to suspend their full body weight using a lanyard, regardless of what kind of lanyard they used. People always repeated what they saw, not what they were told, even if a valid reason existed for what appeared to be a discrepancy. This is how mormonism works. The whole is only as capable as its weakest link and no one wants to think critically. All they want is mental numbness and sameness.

Most Mormons know that they're in a virtual cage and they are struggling to figure out how to be happy in their cage. If you look happy, then you will never have any privacy until they figure out how you can be happy in your cage, or to expose you for not obeying the rules if they can. When you have people with fluid moral/ethical values acting this way, bad things happen.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/17/2021 07:11PM by azsteve.

Brilliant azsteve. Really awesome.

Gonna return with an answer later on. Got to think about it a bit. Because I think you nailed the ”logics” running through many generations in my family tree. Culturally Brännvinsbältet/the Whiskey belt is a deep line going through it all. People in generations rationalizing rigid but very arbitrary social rules combined with hidden addictions of many kinds. Got to think about this one.

My experience is that, in my family system, the majority of the members are chronically preoccupied with putting the disposition in each other. When I changed my life - stopped being co-dependent after seven years of binge drinking - it was with a feeling in my body that the family wanted me to feel bad and be lower in the hierarchy - by my own making - than them so that they would feel better in their daily lives. If I drank more and ranted about my life they could continue to drink and have a solid confidence that their lives were better than mine on many more levels. They did not really wanted to hurt me (well.. ) but just enough of carte blanche to keep living carelessly. Drinking, treating family like crap, being unfaithful, spendning money on frivolities rather than the essentials. Going around just talking lies about everybody/anybody.

When I made the critical decision to start habilitation together with the public health care, I was opposed at ever growing and deeper interpersonal levels in the family system until, in principle, the contact today is completely broken between me and the others. Throughout the process, they were on me and said constantly who I was, who I am, and that I have lost control. They were on and provoked me to be able to point out to me that I was the problem. You lost it, you lost it, see everybody, Cauda lost it.. But I stayed calm until our ways separated.

For a long time I have now immersed myself in psychological texts and about family systems and personality disorders so there was a gut feeling growing that something wrong was going on 247.

The family really tried to restabilize the situation and make me live a life I did not want to live anymore. I wanted a new start and do healthy stuff. Make the constructive possible.

There are several ongoing health problems in the family (mental problems and addictions) and a couple of the members are reluctant to make their own constructive decisions. One has lived a life that has been self-destructive, got diabetes and become wheelchair bound. At first there was a turning point, it looked like some constructive decisions would finally be made, but after a while the person gave up again and began to live passively so that the diabetes worsened and chronic wounds arose on the body.

When I have read your text, I feel that there is a chronic force in the family system to constantly focus on the weaknesses in our personalities and calibrate life on them. But someone need to be the lowest. (It is interesting that the system choose the literal-thinking autist as the calibration point. I guess it has to do with the fact that I carry a greater risk to finally reveal the sham because I am looking for a concrete way out)

On base levels it is frustrating because the more constructive choices in life are not impossible to make. There are all possibilities to do something concrete that is not so grand but gives great positive effects borth short term and long term.

Instead, the people create a greater self-preoccupation and point their finger on others and make unreasonable demands and say that everybody are so judgemental. Around it goes until life is over.

The family system choosed me because I was gullible and always did what they said.

Unconditional love.. Sounds great. For years. A great cause, until one understands that cause was never about the value unconditional love but only to get away with crap and never take responsibility neither respect other people.

I bought the bull. My life is in ruins.

But wisdom.. Yes, azsteve, you gave me an important piece to understand further why I am where I am in life and what I did wrong and what I was fooled by.

.....is that like when my MORmON enforcement agent male parent was dead set on me serving a FOOL time MORMON mission at ANY cost to my personal interests even though he could not be bothered with serving one himself as he was too busy reeling in and getting married to his personal love interest at that time of his life ??

Good example. That must be like a FAE-norm inside cults. The younger members listen carefully to authority that think about worldy things.

Worldly things and the young ones feel irrational trust and think the older people are trustworthy.

Sounds like FAE is just a fancy covering for plain old hypocrisy - being less (hypo) critical of ourselves than we are of others.

But this is also in the nature of the brain. Hypocrisy can be a process not just a cultural thing.

Hi Azsteve, hope you are doing fine.

Just wonder, do you remember in what phase in life the sticky-glue mentality started to grow until people actively to look at others to justify their own bad behaviour?

Must add. Always struggled with people questioning my constant focus on special interests. It always irritated me because I could not get how and why the made so much fuzz about the things I did. I never bothered them about their joys. There were plenty to do for everybody and I was no center of the universe so they attacked me and I felt they did not allowed me to feel joy even in the small things. It was like living like a recluse in the forrest and they were just out to find me to make my life a living hell. Thank you for your frame of reference. My life became a bit easier.

Cauda Wrote:
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> Similar to confirmation and overconfidence biases...

And to plain old hypocrisy.