Ode to a world-saving idea: attribution error and cognitive empathy

I realized a long time ago that "personality" is a function dependent on context. Each situation brings out specific aspects of your personality, and as situations change, personality seems to change. The most clear is in relationships - you can never know how a relationship will go from the outset, even if you knew that person for a long time, it takes being in a relationship (actually be in that situation) to see how your personalities adapt.

Attribution error seems to me like it has less to do with a lack of empathy (cognitive or otherwise) and more to do with simple epistemology. We have knowledge of our own circumstances, or the circumstances of our friends, to explain their actions with attribution to their circumstances, but we do not know about the circumstances of strangers to which we could attribute their actions.

It also goes for successful people. They are usually awarded way too much attribution for outcomes of the things they do especially after they became successful.

My theory: this is a textbook case of System 1 vs System 2 thinking, involving a problem space that forces System 1 (intuition, hallucination) due to the excessive number of variables in play. The problem space in this case is metaphysical causality.

A second layer of it is that it involves the unknown, which also forces System 1 processing. So it's like a double whammy in this case (at least...there are surely many others in play).

War is particularly scary because people's minds have been filled with skilfully written but untrue stories, and this is what System 1 uses to generate "the reality" of the situation and what should be done about it (what they have been told in stories should be done about it).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion

If you think about it, it's kind of funny how much understanding humans have of themselves, but for the most part all they ever do with this knowledge is talk about it. We seem to be fundamentally motivated by short-term pleasure, with some exceptions like the possibility of financial reward (thinking about which likely invokes pleasure?).

War is interesting. Like COVID, it involves preventable death. Unlike COVID though, people don't consider these deaths to be something we must(!) do something about. I wonder what the (actual) cause(s) of this inconsistency is. I also wonder why people don't find paradoxes like this to be interesting.

This sounds like that old pith : "we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are"

It is true that a situation will mostly determine what a person will do. But it is also true that different people will act differently in very close situations.

So how do we separate and weight how much the situation and the personality influence on the outcome? Not having a way of doing this and just saying 'our tendency in most situations to downplay the role of circumstance' seems oddly shallow and irresponsible

> A 2014 article in Psychology Today titled ‘Why We Don’t Give Each Other a Break’ used the example of someone who cuts into a line in front of you. You might think, “What a jerk,” when in reality this person has never skipped ahead in a line before and is doing so now only because he would otherwise miss a flight to see a dying relative.

Perhaps I am falling victim to “attribution error”, but I would bet considerable money that most cases I have witnessed of someone skipping a queue have nothing remotely like a dying relative behind it. This seems like a nice kumbaya sort of explanation that misdiagnoses reality.

I don't love the first example used:

> A 2014 article in Psychology Today titled ‘Why We Don’t Give Each Other a Break’ used the example of someone who cuts into a line in front of you. You might think, “What a jerk,” when in reality this person has never skipped ahead in a line before and is doing so now only because he would otherwise miss a flight to see a dying relative.

That’s certainly possible, but extremely unlikely. The most likely explanation is that they’re in a hurry and selfish enough to ignore the other people in line.

As a side note, I firmly believe that cutting in line (or late merging into a turn lane) is the worst, most selfish thing that people do all the time.