Your instructor or professor may refer to it as “fundamental attribution
error.” It’s natural to try to make sense out of chaos –
you know what happened, and because you know what happened, you come up
with a plausible explaination for why it happened.
But sometimes chaos is just chaos, and random chance is all that determined
how events unfolded. Sometimes fundamental attribution error occurs when
the causal relationship you propose is the wrong causal relationship.
And sometimes it occurs because there is no causal relationship –
if the same event were repeated the outcome could easily have completely
different.
W. Edwards Deming showed us how the same worker performing the same task
can have a wide range of outputs based on raw material or tooling, and
that we must be careful when suggesting a causal relationship between
the care a worker puts into the task at hand and the quality of the product.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness notes the near-universal
tendency to create faux causal relationships where none exist.
That near-universal tendency to create faux causal relationships as it
relates to commissioned sales forces is explored in The Sales Force. For
more detail on that topic, read this free excerpt.
