June 29, 2016

June 29, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my fourteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors discuss what is known in social psychology as the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” the tendency to ascribe behavior of someone else to dispositional causes and to ascribe our own behavior to situational causes. The reason that individuals attribute behavior either to internal or external variables is relative to the access that one has to someone’s behavioral history. 

If someone is a total stranger to us, we haven’t talked and we have no access to his or her behavioral history and thus, internal attributes are more likely to be made, but the more familiar we are with a person, the more we know about his or her behavioral history and, the more we are capable of explaining this person’s behavior based on what we know. 

Situational attributions are more likely if we talk and come to know someone. Also our own behavior is more likely to be attributed to false dispositional causes relative to our lack of knowledge of behavioral science and our individual behavioral history. The more knowledgeable we become about behavioral science, the more likely we will look into our phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural conditioning and the more likely we will be to attribute our own behavior to situational causes. 

I guess it takes someone with some knowledge of behavioral science to write this. Hayes (1987) found students “gave causal status to the feelings and thoughts of the client.” They also “reported internal explanations for their own behavior in these type of situations”, as they knew about “common clinical situations.” Thus, the real point of the “Fundamental Attribution Error” is the inner causation of behavior!