In five years from now, I can say without a doubt, I will remember both concepts of Attribution and the Fundemental Attribution Error. Attribution is the process of assigning causes to behavior and the Fundemental Attribution Error is the tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on other people's behavior.
I had somewhat of an understanding of these concepts from my experiences in highschool. I took note in highschool that people were quick to come up inaccurate assumptions for why other people behaved the way that they did. Sometimes these assumptions resulted in social stigmas that would stay with these unfortunate people for the rest of their highschool career.
By experiencing and knowing others that experienced the wrong end of the fundemental attribution error, I learned to not judge others by their behavior and not to make wild assumptions about their personality and the reasons for these behaviors. These judgements had a tendency to be wrong more than they were right.
Today, I am able to catch others around me making wild judgements about why crimes being reported in the media, had occured. When myself or others create these judgements, I think to myself that we do not know the motives for these crimes and we do not know the person or what they go through on a day-to-day basis. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that we can come up with accurate attributions as to why people are doing the things they do.
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