Scientific American
Zeynep Tufekci has written something important here. It's too bad more people won't read it.
We have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the
fundamental attribution error.
When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding.
She says Game of Thrones was good because it emphasized the sociological, not the psychological.
She mentions this is also a problem in the technical writing that she does, but unfortunately does not go into this.
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