Examples Of Attribution Error In Psychology

The fundamental attribution error is when you blame the person’s actions on their personality instead of external attributions like having a hard day at work. I found this interesting mainly because of the prison experiment, and how a situation could change a person’s behavior so much in a surprisingly short span of time. It was really alarming, and taught me that people are sometimes not born the way they are, but they are fashioned that way as a result of their situation forcing them to turn out like that. We usually don’t see what is behind the curtain due to the fact that we don’t have time to learn about their entire life, so we take shortcuts and classify them based on stereotypes and our experiences. This could relate to what McRaney …show more content…
However, we ignore that fact since it is easier to say, “this would never happen to me” and maintain sanity, then to think that a combination of some terrible events and pressure could push us to that breaking point, which is too hard of a pill to swallow. Also, sometimes we don’t have time to think logically in the heat of the moment. If a person just cut you off in traffic, it is easier and faster to blame it on the person than to think that he is in a rush or having a terrible day. That is why I believe it is important to learn about this, so that I will not blame the people I love for being rude or cold, but instead help the person get better or give them space to recover and recuperate. Knowing this, I will take time to learn more about the person before I judge them for their …show more content…
They are abnormally calm or they freeze up, and pretend that everything is normal. This could be from the genetic aspect where prey would freeze or play dead when in danger or when a predator is approaching. The prey does this in hopes that the predator would stop chasing and attacking if their food was not moving. However, that will not work in the modern world since we cannot just stop moving. The incoming danger will not pass by leaving us unharmed. We also underestimate and ignore the danger that we are in, saying, “It’s not going to be that big of a deal”, even though we are given many warnings about the danger we are going to be facing. There are many documentation of this happening, but people still do normalcy bias. That is why it is extremely important to learn about this topic because it could literally mean the difference between life and death. To help overcome normalcy bias, you should first learn what to do in case of a disaster, like a hurricane, and practice it since people who do not know what to do in the case of emergency are more likely to suffer from normalcy bias. Also, if there is a warning that a disaster is coming, take it seriously because it is better to endure through a false alarm alive, then it is not taking the real alarm seriously, and dying from