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!