[discussion] How do you combat the cognitive bias of fundamental attribution error? (Also rambling about memory errors.)

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error):

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior, where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration.

To me this is one of the things that Stoicism should most clearly address, because it both has practical and ethical consequences, and it is the sort of thing that interferes with one's practical rationality.

The way I look at fundamental attribution error, when someone does something that upsets you, you are more likely to see it as as an inner disposition of some kind, that the person is ignorant, malicious or stupid. But when you do something that upsets someone else, you don't use the same kind of reasoning: You see yourself as a victim of circumstances, or that there is nothing you could have done about it, etc.

To me Stoicism addresses this, but indirectly. If you view people's actions deterministically, and are consistent about this, then you have to view everything that everyone does as necessary. That is, everyone is a victim of circumstances.

The doctrine of virtue and vice is the same way. If someone is malicious, and someone performs a malicious act against me, I can't fault the act but the character state that created the act. It took years, perhaps decades, to create that character state and to "bake it in"; that someone acts according to their character should be unsurprising. Suppose that the person realizes what he has done, and didn't wish to do it, then I have some sympathy for the person, even if I am the victim. It's hard to turn about a massive ship.

But in many cases, I generally try to doubt my instinctive judgments and my intutions, and I try to construct the best case and worst case for the person I'm judging. I try to be both prosecutor and defendant.

For myself, one exercise is to suppose that my soul actually entered another mind, and I am now this person is who is looking around, and I am the one inspecting these thoughts, knowing that they are the thoughts of someone else who I have no reason to trust. Similarly with my memories, they are the memories of someone else, and you can't trust that they are accurate. After all, it has been found that memory is notoriously unreliable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_errors).

This last fact might make recording information into your journal more important than ever, because over time your memory degrades and you might later make accusations against others that are simply false. That is, unless we can find some discipline for preserving the integrity of our memories, like the method of loci (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci).

Or we should simply use the discipline of assent on our memory: If we are at all unsure about a memory, then we try to delete it by treating it as unreliable. The more certain memories we should try to re-evoke and strengthen by recalling them. Some kind of practice like this each day, alone with a special journal, may help to preserve only true memories, while removing false or unreliable memories.