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attribution
You view your own moral failures as situational accidents.
A 1971 study by Jones and Nisbett proposed that actors attribute their own behaviors to situational factors while observers attribute the same behaviors to stable dispositions.
The date is 1971, not 1995, and the theory applies to general attribution patterns, not exclusively unethical ones.
Your moral code is written in pencil for you and ink for others.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Jones and Nisbett, 1971, Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior
- What the check found
- The core mechanism is misdated by 24 years and misapplied specifically to ethics. The original hypothesis has also been significantly challenged in modern literature.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.