The Human Factor

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a concept derived from the field of social psychology. We are all guilty for committing this error.

As an example, try to think of a time that someone cut you off in traffic, or didn’t use their signal, or pulled out in front of you. Or maybe that time the wait staff at your favorite restaurant wasn’t quite nice. You were probably angry, frustrated and would have loved the opportunity to give that driver or waiter a piece of your mind.

You may have heard of British neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

At the heart of that story was a disease called prosopagnosia, or as it’s more commonly called, face blindness. A person with face blindness can no longer process the visual information that allows them to recognize a face.

The head remains but instead of it revealing itself as eyes, ears, nose and mouth, it becomes a scrambled puzzle.

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a concept derived from the field of social psychology. We are all guilty for committing this error.

As an example, try to think of a time that someone cut you off in traffic, or didn’t use their signal, or pulled out in front of you. Or maybe that time the wait staff at your favorite restaurant wasn’t quite nice. You were probably angry, frustrated and would have loved the opportunity to give that driver or waiter a piece of your mind.

Three Mile Island stands out as one of the greatest U.S. tragedies, and possibly the first major disaster of the nuclear age. Being one of the first, and one of the most publicized reactor meltdowns in world history, it would be almost a decade before the disaster was overshadowed by that of Chernobyl.