Reducing The Error's Effects
A number of "debiasing" techniques have been found effective in reducing the effect of the fundamental attribution error:
- Taking heed of "consensus" information. If most people behave the same way when put in the same situation, then the situation is more likely to be the cause of the behavior.
- Asking oneself how one would behave in the same situation.
- Looking for unseen causes; specifically, looking for less-salient factors.
However, even when participants were made aware ulterior motives existed to take a particular position, such as with the pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays mentioned above, they were still prone to the fundamental attribution error.
Read more about this topic: Fundamental Attribution Error
Famous quotes containing the words reducing, error and/or effects:
“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions ... too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)