One-sided journalism and the fundamental attribution error

Jon Allsop writes in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In late May, over the Memorial Day weekend, the top story on NBC’s Meet the Press was a recent vote by Republican senators to kill the prospect of an independent, fully bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. . . . At the top of the show, Chuck Todd, the host, correctly noted that it was Republicans who blocked the commission. . . . Todd also asked, “​​On this Memorial Day weekend, if Congress can’t even agree on an independent January 6 commission, what can it agree on?”

As Allsop notes, it’s complicated. What Todd said is literally true: Congress, the institution, can’t even agree on a commission to investigate the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. But it’s also true that all the disagreement is coming from the Republican half of Congress. Allsop criticizes this reporting, but I don’t see any easy answer here. Todd can blame the Republicans 100%, but it’s also unfortunate that Congress as an institution can’t handle this. The problem seems to be the majority-of-a-minority thing. The Republicans are the minority party, but a majority of this minority is basically siding with the insurrection, or I guess it would be more accurate to say they want to avoid taking any position on the insurrection because it’s basically a losing issue for them either way. If it weren’t for party discipline, it seems that Congress could make more progress on this.

Anyway, so far I feel like, although the reporting on the commission might seem frustrating, it’s also accurate. But then Allsop continues with more of the story:

As the story has developed—with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi establishing a select committee to investigate January 6 in lieu of a commission—these motifs have persisted; last week, they crescendoed, as Pelosi blocked two Republican Congressmen—Jim Banks and Jim Jordan—from appointment to the panel, leading Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, to pull all five of his picks. Banks had been overtly hostile to the prospect of the committee and Jordan may be a material witness to Donald Trump’s complicity in the insurrection; both men voted to reverse Trump’s defeat in key states, abetting the Big Lie that incited the insurrection in the first place. Pelosi’s decision not to seat them thus looked like a move to shore up the credibility of the committee’s investigation against inevitable bad-faith attacks from within.

And now some media criticism that resonates more with me:

And yet a number of journalists and commentators reached very different conclusions. Rachael Bade, of Politico, said that Pelosi had given a “gift” to McCarthy: “He wanted this panel to look partisan and political. Now it’s definitely going to look partisan and political.” . . . Chris Cillizza, of CNN, told anyone still harboring hopes that the committee might deepen public understanding of January 6 to “give up on those hopes now,” because Pelosi had just “doomed” them.

Allsop continues:

This is itself a much broader problem than mere false equivalence, reflecting—as Brian Beutler, of Crooked Media, and others have put it—the commonplace journalistic assumption that “Republican bad faith… is just a feature of the landscape,” whereas a given Democrat is “an actor with agency, and subject to scrutiny.”

And that reminded me of something I’ve noticed in popular history writing, which is a form of reasoning that focuses on the mistakes on “our side” and assumes that whatever “their side” does is pre-ordained. It’s a sort of fundamental attribution error by which our decisions and mistakes are based on context and circumstance, whereas theirs are based on their unchangeable character.

An example that came up in this space a few years ago is the tendency of some British historians to blame World War 1 on . . . Britain! See here (Christopher Clark) and here (Niall Ferguson, taking a break from gay-bashing and campus politics).

I don’t think this is political, at least not in a direct sense. I’m guessing most U.S. political journalists are center-left (not a difficult place to be in the U.S., given that publicly objecting to the January 2021 insurrection will automatically put you somewhere in the center or left of the spectrum in this country), Ferguson is on the center-right (or maybe not anymore after that riot), and I have no idea where Clark falls on the political spectrum. I see this more of a general problem that we assign more agency to people who we feel are, or should be, on our side. I guess I do this too sometimes, for example when I get annoyed at practitioners of bad science. I’m a scientist myself, so I think of other people with the “scientist” label as being my sort of person.

I don’t have anything new to add here; my main point is the similarity I see of reporters blaming U.S. political culture on the Democrats to historians blaming WW1 on the British, in both cases just accepting by default the idea that the people on the other side had no choice.

People always have a choice. The complicating factor is that choices are constrained in various ways. In 2021, Republican politicians’ choices are constrained by some combination of public opinion of Republican voters, the rules of the U.S. Senate, and the role of partisan news media. In 1914, German leaders’ choices were constrained by outdated military theories, internal politics, and international alliances. You can blame the constraints and also blame the individual decision makers. But if you’re not careful it’s easy to assign most of the agency to your own side.

52 thoughts on “One-sided journalism and the fundamental attribution error

  1. Timely, given the current discussions regarding what “we” (the West) could have done to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the one hand, I can see how it makes sense to discuss that issue, since we only have direct control of our own actions, so it is worth thinking about how we could have (or could in the future) act more effectively. But as you say, such discussions implicitly assume that our actions would have had a difference when they are only one potential causal factor. As the saying goes, sometimes we need to accept the things we cannot change.

        • I’m not sure it would show up in a search, most people probably have an idea what it refers to.

          Personally I would be wary of suddenly starting to identify as “the west” like gec does.

      • The West variously means different things depending on who’s speaking and why. I think right now it’s being used in the Cold War sense of U.S. NATO vs China/Russia/”socialist” countries, since that particular conflict is top of mind and is rapidly binarizing the world.

        I think its origin is like, the Crusades, during which times it would have been Christendom vs Islam with the Byzantines, the Ottomans, and the Arabic Penninsula. It’s really just a flexible way of dichotomizing the world. Japanese and Koreans might use “Western” to describe the cultures of U.S., Europe, and even Russia, though both are very much a part of the “Western” alliance in terms of international power struggle. Same with the ECOWAS African block.

        • I’m fairly certain I noticed the sudden increase in usage (on reddit) before the invasion.

          At the time I attributed it to russian/chinese propaganda due to the nature of the posts where I saw it, but now everyone seems to be using that framing.

        • Based on my very unscientific assessment, my feeling is that a sense of resurgence in Cold War thinking in the National Security establishment came with

          1. The Trump-Russia-Ukraine scandals
          2. Trump’s identification of China as a serious international rival, eventually followed with de facto bipartisan/nonpartisan support

          Then it bubbled into the broader culture with the Biden administration’s resumption of the usual “rules-based international order” foreign policy and White House cooperation with “respected” corporate journalists.

          https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trump-biden-foreign-policy-transition-fdds-david/id1286906615?i=1000506706090

        • Yea, it is obviously a slippery term used to encourage people to divide along tribal lines (like democrat/republican). Also it has been around for quite a bit in one form or the other.

          I am just saying that starting around Jan/Feb, I began to see it used all the time. Was there a NYT article that used the term around then or something? Or news anchors began using it?

          On the other hand, when I first noticed this going on reading reddit, it was being used in a notably “anti-west” way. In that case, perhaps the sudden influx of this term into what I normally read is not organic.

        • Anoneuoid, its not hard to think of reasons why the “NATO + Israel + Japan” sense of “the West” is very common in Anglo current-affairs talk in early 2022! But that term has been very common since the late Cold War, and reasonably common since the early to mid 20th century. So I would not overthink why it came in to fashion this winter.

        • Anoneuoid –

          Do you have any evidence of increased usage other than some vague sense that the usage had recently increased? Anything at all to distinguish between an actual increase in usage and an increase in your noticing it (in the set of areas where you follow discussions) being used, or an increased focus on topics of discussion where it was just as likely to have been used previously?

        • Anon, Sean, Joshua:

          It’s my vague sense that “the West” or “Western civilization” used to be a general consensus term (for example, consider Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” and William McNeill’s “Rise of the West”), then for a couple decades it became a popular term on the right (for example, in the writings of Samuel Huntington), sometimes in a negative way (the West as decadent godless materialism) and sometimes in a positive way (the West as European or white civilization). More recently with the Russia-Ukraine war, the idea of “the West” seems to have been taken up by the center-left as representing something comparable to what in the Cold War we used to call “the free world.” The difference is that, in the cold war, “the West” or “the free world” was defined in opposition to communism and the extreme left, whereas right now, “the West” or “the free world” is defined in opposition to fascism and the extreme right. This has implications for U.S. politics as well.

        • Andrew –

          > It’s my vague sense that “the West” or “Western civilization” used to be…

          I think that “the West” and “Western Civilization” have somewhat different connotations. In that sense, Japan can generally be seen as part of “the West” (in other words, roughly capitalist and roughly a democracy) even it it is situated in “the East” and not part of “Western Civilization,” (and perhaps not exactly capitalist and not exactly a democracy.

          I would expect that the term would evolve to some extent over time as geopoitics evolve. Sean’s comment fits with my viewpoint:

          https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/30/one-sided-journalism-and-the-fundamental-attribution-error/#comment-2048491

          It’s a loose term and if you “overthink” it, of course it will break down, kind of like analogies can be useful in broad strokes even if they break down if you examine them very closely. (Although I wouldn’t use the term “overthink” because I think asking what people actually mean when they use a term is actually quite useful).

  2. “But it’s also true that all the disagreement is coming from the Republican half of Congress. ”

    The big lie here is that “Issue A” and “Issue B” in Congress are separate issues.

    No two issues are separate in Congress. The disagreement on “A” is coming from Republicans. But on “B” – say, Biden restricting drilling and oil operations in the US, or even state level issues – Democrats are moving on their own without compromise or input from Republicans.

    The Republicans are obstructing on Jan 6 and The Big Election Lie because they’re extremely unhappy with Democrat / Progressive actions on numerous other issues over many years at every level of government.

    • Anon:

      Agreed. Some Republicans were frustrated at losing the election, enough so that they were willing to overthrow the government. Others didn’t want to overthrow the government but they didn’t mind if other people did it. Others didn’t want the government overthrown at all but didn’t want to lose the support of the people who wanted to overthrow the government. And others were willing to actively oppose the attempt to overthrow the government. Some combination of internal politics in the Republican party, public opinion, media organizations, etc., along with the receding of the direct threat, led to the party coalescing in support for the attempted overthrow. It’s complicated. I agree with what you said that these actions were based on frustration at Republicans not being in control. Historically, parties in the U.S. have been ok with taking turns at power but not this time.

      • “I agree with what you said that these actions were based on frustration at Republicans not being in control.”

        If we go back several decades we’ll find that Democrats are the party that initiated the sidelining of judicial nominations and more recently Democrats have mooted the idea of expanding the Supreme Court because they aren’t in control; adding minor states (D.C., Puerto Rico or any other geographic area intended to give them two sure Democrat senators) because they aren’t in control; walking out of various state legislatures because they aren’t in control; blocking voter ID laws to help them regain control; and a number of other “bad faith” efforts to enforce the minority will on the majority.

        So, yeah, it is complicated.

        • Right, many Democrats have been _discussing_ what mechanisms they could _legally_ use to increase their political power, and many Republicans have supported an _illegal_ attempt to overthrow the government.

          I think it’s fine to point out that both parties would like to increase their power, but silly to suggest that both parties are really the same (in recent years) in the ways they are trying to do this.

        • “what mechanisms they could _legally_ use”

          Like instructing the police to stand down and allowing rioters to tear up cities, destroy property and business, as was done in the spring and summer prior to the election, in hopes of scoring political points? Would that be legal? Almost the entire congressional delegation in our state is Democrat, and not one of them came out and asked for calm or peaceful protest during the rioting of 2020.

          You’re claim that Democrats use “legal means” is BS – they intentionally restrained and even attacked police and strongly encouraged rioters to push forward in hopes of stirring broader leftwing / anti-trump sentiments in the face of the election.

          No one is investigating Democrat complicity in the riots, are they?

        • No one:

          I have no idea what you mean by “sophomoric at best.” If there is anything particular in the above post that you disagree with or that you find “deranged,” you can let us know. It’s hard to do much with your comment when you offer no specifics.

        • By now, if you refer to the riots on Jan 6 as insurrection, you are being sophomoric. The FBI, no friend of Trump, concluded there was no organization to the events. Trump’s involvement is even sillier as there is video of him emphasizing ‘peacefully’ voicing your discontent. Democrats are more worried about all the selfies than they were at the bombing of the Capitol building in 1981.
          More interesting might be your analysis of the voter fraud.
          https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/28/joe-biden-got-255000-excess-votes-fraud-tainted-sw/

        • Why do sophomores get such a bad name? Anecdotally, sophomores tend to be among the better students in my classes. They have enough background and practice to be able to manage the workload, have a social network that allows them to form more effective study groups, and they tend to be more confident about asking and answering questions. And unlike seniors, they care more about understanding the material than just passing so they can graduate.

        • TMC:

          Regarding Lott: yeah, what anon e mouse said. More generally, regarding claims of widespread election fraud, see the Grimmer article discussed here. Regarding the word “insurrection”: the dictionary definition is “a violent uprising against an authority or government,” which pretty much covers what happened that day at the Capitol. But, yeah, I understand from the polls that a large chunk of Americans believe the voter fraud lie and related things, so it’s no surprise that some of these people find their way over to the blog to comment.

        • Andrew, your link post is over a year old, and there has been a lot of work done on this since. “No Evidence For Voter Fraud” is always true, until there is evidence.
          As for Lott, I thought a critique of his work would be more persuasive than what you think of him as a person. His work seems to echo a lot of the newer reports on voter fraud, so they seem plausible.

          A former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge just asked Wisconsin to decertify it’s votes after an investigation. He claims there is no way they know who won the election.

          Pennsylvania also had it’s changes in election policy ruled illegal in court. Nevada’s audit revealed a 2x number larger then the margin of victory of illegal votes.

          Because of the secrecy of the vote specific fraud won’t be found, but good statistics should be able to tell us if foul play was likely.

        • TMC:

          1. I agree that people keep coming up with theories about massive election fraud. One reason I don’t believe these is that the people pushing these theories are pretty much the same as the same as the people pushing all the false theories that Grimmer went to the trouble of tracking down and refuting. I appreciate that people like Grimmer do this hard work, and I guess that if these new theories continue to float around, someone will get around to shooting them down too. Probably has already happened, actually. You can go on the internet and find new JFK and 911 theories too. Given the way all the past theories have gone, I don’t really need to take it seriously when some bozo runs a regression or performs a hypothesis test or whatever.

          2. Lott has a track record of bad work and of misrepresenting himself. This track record is relevant to evaluating whatever new claims he’s pushing. This has nothing to do with what we “think of him as a person”; it has everything to do with his past conduct as a researcher.

          3. You cite a former Wisconsin supreme court judge. I can top you by citing a sitting U.S. senator: Ted Cruz has endorsed junk science election fraud claims. All this tells me is that this is all super-politicized, and unfortunately lots of prominent political figures are willing to endorse various combinations of lies, confusion, and wishful thinking.

        • TMC –

          > No Evidence For Voter Fraud” is always true, until there is evidence.

          I think you have that backwards: The way it should go is that election fraud is always plausible (and massive) even though you have no actual evidence of election fraud.

        • Tmc, Joshua:

          Election fraud is not zero. Also, in addition to fraud, there are lots of misclassified ballots. A bunch of years ago an MIT team estimated something like 1% to 4% of ballots were misclassified, things like undervotes and overvotes and hanging chad and all the things that caused Bush to be declared the winner in Florida in 2000 even though the best estimate is that Gore won something like 20,000 more votes. I’m very supportive of moves to make elections and voting more transparent.

          There are also specific claims made by leading Republicans that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election. These are high-stakes claims that have received lots of publicity and have crumbled under investigation. One problem here is that the authority figures such as Ted Cruz who have pushed these refuted claims have not backed away; they just leave all the junk out there to muddy the waters.

        • TMC:
          I read the Nevada report and it doesn’t say what you say it says. They appear to have considered perhaps a few dozen cases worthy of law enforcement investigation. (It’s easy to find online and very readable!) I’m going to combine that with citing Lott and say maybe you’re more interested in partisan politics than truth.

        • Andrew: The NYT and a ‘consortium of news organizations’ found:
          “The study, conducted over the last 10 months by a consortium of eight news organizations assisted by professional statisticians, examined numerous hypothetical ways of recounting the Florida ballots. Under some methods, Mr. Gore would have emerged the winner; in others, Mr. Bush. But in each one, the margin of victory was smaller than the 537-vote lead that state election officials ultimately awarded Mr. Bush. For example, if Florida’s 67 counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida court on Dec. 8, applying the standards that election officials said they would have used, Mr. Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.”
          https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/us/examining-vote-overview-study-disputed-florida-ballots-finds-justices-did-not.html

          Bush won in all but a couple of scenarios they ran. Even the ones where Gore would come out a head it was by a hundred or two votes.

          anon e mouse: “maybe you’re more interested in partisan politics than truth.” Just the truth. “citing Lott” is keeping within what other findings have been. I don’t know Lott from a hole in the ground. Again, I’m more interested in the numbers and their accuracy then personalities.
          Nothing can be done with all of this now, but identifying the weak spots and fixing them should be of interest to everyone but the cheaters.

        • Tmc:

          Regarding the 2000 Florida election, see this article by Mebane from 2004.

          Regarding the rest of your comment: I completely agree that it’s important to identify problems with election administration. And I also think that political partisans can be helpful here: just because people are political partisans, it doesn’t mean that they can’t give honest objective takes on the data. Unfortunately, I don’t think that John Lott or Ted Cruz are being helpful regarding the 2000 election: rather than giving serious takes on election problems, they’re promoting junk science and serving as “merchants of doubt” and muddying the waters. I can see how Cruz, Lott, etc., can think this is good for them politically, and I can see how they could justify it to themselves by saying that people on the other side do it too; I still don’t like it.

      • Anonymous,
        There was unrest and rioting in cities with Republican mayors and Republican governors too, including Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, and Charleston to name three out of many. So it’s even worse than you think! The Republicans are in cahoots with the Democrats, refusing to investigate the Democrats who (you claim) behaved illegally in scheming to make the riots happen!

        But in answer to your question: I’m not a lawyer but I think it’s often legal for superior officers to exercise discretion in deciding whether and how to intervene in a riot. I don’t know that it’s _always_ legal — presumably there has to be a public safety reason in deciding not to enforce laws — but although there’s often second-guessing afterwards I think it’s extremely rare for decision-makers to be brought up on charges merely for imposing rules of engagement that restrain police. For instance, the Capitol Police were instructed not to use stun grenades and other crowd control weapons in responding to the January 6 riots, a decision for which they have been excoriated but not charged with a crime. So it’s not just Democrats who have issued directives that restrain police from controlling riots.

        You listed a bunch of specific things Democrats have done, here’s your list: “sidelining of judicial nominations and more recently Democrats have mooted the idea of expanding the Supreme Court because they aren’t in control; adding minor states (D.C., Puerto Rico or any other geographic area intended to give them two sure Democrat senators) because they aren’t in control; walking out of various state legislatures because they aren’t in control; blocking voter ID laws to help them regain control; and a number of other “bad faith” efforts to enforce the minority will on the majority.”

        Which of those is illegal? That’s a rhetorical question, I will answer it: None of them. It is not illegal to “sideline judicial nominations”, something Republicans have done far more than Democrats. Also not illegal to “moot the idea” of expanding the Supreme Court. Not illegal to discuss the possibility of adding additional states. Also not (in most cases) illegal to walk out of state legislatures. Not illegal to “block voter ID laws”, if by “blocking them” you mean voting against them in sufficient numbers that they don’t pass. None of those are illegal.

    • “The Republicans are obstructing on Jan 6 and The Big Election Lie because they’re extremely unhappy with Democrat / Progressive actions on numerous other issues over many years at every level of government.”

      Your argument is that the Republicans are obstructing investigation into an actual coup attempt against the United States government and suborning the overturning of a valid election because they’re annoyed that the other party has different opinions on lots of issues? You really want to go with that?

    • > The Republicans are obstructing on Jan 6 and The Big Election Lie because they’re extremely unhappy with Democrat / Progressive actions on numerous other issues over many years at every level of government.

      Disagree.I think Republicans are viewing Jan 6 via a vis their base. Explicitly acting as if Jan. was in some way meaningful is a political Moser for them. It would be even worse than saying the election wasn’t stolen (which a few have actually done, at least before doing a 180). Zero sum is the name of the game. It has less to do, imo, with being “unhappy” with Democrats’ actions, and more to do with identities.

      I should note, that’s not assigning a causal mechanism any differently to Republicans than I would to Democrats.

  3. Whenever there is no compromise, then both sides are responsible for the lack of compromise. Even where one side refuses to budge at all on some issue, compromise can generally be achieved by finding an intransigent issue on the other side and having both sides give in. We are currently in a position, owing to negative polarization, in which neither side wants to compromise on anything because they’ll look bad to their own side. But both sides have total agency, including the ability to commit political suicide.

  4. Isn’t this nothing but a side effect of the fact that we ultimately want to use information to inform action?

    If I’m talking to my wife about how we should respond to an obnoxious neighbor I’ll treat her choices and mine as variables whose values we can change to optimize the outcome while I’ll treat the obnoxious neighbor’s behavior as a given in the situation. Sure, in a global philosophical sense that neighbor has as much agency as either of us do but it would be a pretty useless way to deal with the problem to say: “I know, the neighbor will just stop being an asshole and won’t complain anymore about our tree.”

    I’m not sure if this can be fixed or even should be. Any account reaching counterfactual conclusions has to pick a set of things to regard as independent variables and others as dependent variables and the natural way to do this is based on who you take to be part of the group making the decisions.

    • Peter:

      I disagree with your last sentence. I know that this is how a lot of people think about casual inference, but in the potential outcome framework we don’t think about picking variables and labeling them as dependent or independent; rather, we consider various possible interventions and potential outcomes. In this case, we can think of people in both political parties as having agency; we don’t have to choose just one. This is especially true for those of us who are mostly observers, not participants, in politics.

  5. I’m not going to defend the reporting (because it is indefensible). But, it is reasonable to think that the more sensible people could have come up with a way to avoid the problems caused by the less sensible (or crazy) people. That doesn’t mean the more sensible people deserve more blame than the less sensible people.

  6. I hate the term “fundamental attribution error.” First, I don’t understand what is fundamental about it. More importantly, it isn’t an error or maybe it is an error in the same way that all informal fallacies are errors. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. I think in many strategic situations it makes sense to assume that your opponent is just locked in and going to do what he is going to do, and then ask yourself how to deal with that fact. I don’t ascribe as much agency to my opponent because I have no control over his decision making process except through my responses which I do control. And, this perhaps explains why the press tends to ascribe more agency to the Democrats than the Republicans. They are on the Democrats side and speaking to a Democratic audience, and actually speaking strategically. It is the same reason, why Biden saying that Putin can continue to govern gets 24/7 coverage as some hugh error. Everyone assumes that Putin is going keep up the killing, and he’ll just use the remark as propaganda or to escalate. I understand that that coverage in a certain way lets Putin off the hook. But, it still does make sense to have a conversation about whether Biden should have said that given the Putin is going to keep being Putin. Just as it can make sense to ask whether Pelosi made the right decision on the Jan 6 committee (she did) given that Republicans are going to keep being obstructionists.

    But, I also agree that if the goal is accurate description, then yes, it is an error to ascribe more agency to one side than the other. Putin has the ability to stop murdering Ukrainians and Republicans have the ability to say, “Trying to overthrow democracy is bad.”

    • Attribution theory is about where we locate the causes of behavior. We see our own behavior as a response to external forces. “I was left with no choice but to . . . “ We attribute the behavior of Others to internal factors (personality traits, character, etc.). We downplay or ignore the external factors affecting Other’s decision. (Haters goona hate, Putin’s gonna Putin, impying that their behavior is caused by immutable traits.) That is the fundamental attribution error.

      • I know what psychologists mean by the term, but it isn’t an error in reasoning. It is a heuristic that works fine sometimes and in other circumstances leads to mistakes.

    • I think of fundamental attribution error as a subset of tribalistic/identity-based biases.

      It describes a pattern whereby a generalization is made that people (that I) identify as being an an “other” group are “fundamentally” different than people in “my” group.

      Usually, it’s something like “they” are (fundamentally) morally deficient and that explains their choices and behaviors whereas my group’s choices and behaviors can be explained by rational context-specific factors.

      An example would be the application of “virtue signaling. IOW, libz don’t really care about something like a wearing mask or offending people by using offensive terms. All they really care about is appearing to care about those things and acting superior to us common folks. And that’s a reflection of their moral deficiency. If they really cared about the relevant context, they would make more rational decisions and act like conz (and not wear masks because clearly they don’t work).

      Of course, that was only one example. People of all groups are fundamentally prone to the fundamental attribution error.

      • I don’t like spiders or snakes. I guess that I instinctively believe they are all poisonous. That is not an error in thinking. It is a default. Not understanding that people need to use defaults in reasoning is an error in reasoning. I am going to call it the “fundamental academic error” although it isn’t really fundamental.

        • Steve –

          Seems to me that you’re thinking that I think that applying defaults for reasoining is an error in reasoning.

          I don’t think so, as a general rule.

          Yes, there is a reason why these heuritistics exist. As a general practice, they sometimes work out on average. If you don’t have more information you’re often better off in the long run in applying some shortcuts to asses risk.

          But independent of what I suspect was a misunderstanding of my views (perhaps I should have worded my comment differently to avoid that), I’m still not sure how your comment connects back to my commenet.

  7. On the broader interwebs this phenomenon is known as Murc’s Law after a commenter at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog (where Paul Campos, sometimes linked here, writes).

  8. 《when I get annoyed at practitioners of bad science. I’m a scientist myself, so I think of other people with the “scientist” label as being my sort of person.》

    Why get annoyed in blog after blog at Turing’s implication that ESP is scientifically supported, but give a pass to the scientist practitioners who injected him with estrogen for the crime of being homosexual?

    Are academics just convenient tools for the arbitrary political powers of the day, finding ingenious statistics to validate violent state policies such as prosecuting deviant sexual preferences? Do all these attacks on harmless pseudosciences such as astrology or reflexology distract you from the real physical harms caused by the scientific mistakes in medicine for example that led to homosexuality being classified as an illness to be cured?

  9. But it’s also true that all the disagreement is coming from the Republican half of Congress

    A disagreement by its nature requires people on both sides. If either side converted, there would no longer be a disagreement. Although if all of Congress dropped the idea of an investigation they could still disagree with Allsop.

    U.S. political journalists are center-left […] Ferguson is on the center-right

    As noted, he’s British, and he was writing about conflicts between countries rather than political parties.

    the people on the other side had no choice

    I think the simpler answer is that the people on the other side have different interests and are unlikely to listen to you when you talk about what should be done. Whereas you could potentially convince people on your own side that from your own shared perspective X should be done.

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