Richard Beck is doing a series on Everyday Evil. Check it out. Yesterday’s post was The Fundamental Attribution Error, which is that humans tend to “overestimate dispositional factors over situational factors in explaining human behavior. Phrased another way, we tend to see the things going on inside of a person (e.g., traits, personality, motives, desires) as more important than the forces outside of the person (e.g., context, social pressures) in determining behavior. Basically, we downplay the power of context and situation.” This leads to overestimating “the strength of our character. That is, we tend to apply labels to ourselves, seeing … Continue reading Ordinary Evil