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Friday, August 2, 2019

Basketball and Bias: Fundamental Attribution Error or How We Get It Wrong

Beware snap judgments. "She can't play" or "What a doofus." 

 Stephen Covey discussed a traveler upset with small children running wild on a subway, father head in hands. "Can't you control your children?" The father replied, "It's been really hard since their mother died. I'm struggling." Ouch. 

 Fundamental attribution error (FAE). What is it?  We often judge other people's decisions based on their character and less on their situation. This has many applications. 

Michael Simmons discusses FAE at Medium. 
Was Isiah Thomas excluded from the 1992 Olympics because of personalities or situation? He wasn't emotionally close to a number of Dream Teamers but there was also small demand for a shoot-first point guard on a team of legends.

 Apply this to individuals and teams. The 2018-2019 Boston Celtics had flawed composition, personality conflicts, and inadequate leadership...ingredients that cooked a failing recipe. It's convenient, but often wrong, to scapegoat one individual. 

 Overcoming fundamental attribution error means openness to understanding people's individual situations. In medicine, we struggle daily between understanding an individual's symptom (e.g. pain) and tendencies (e.g. drug seeking behavior). 

 As coaches, our situations (competitiveness, desire to win) can cloud our judgment, butting heads with players with different priorities. We can misrepresent their situations without discovering their reality. Players may need to miss practice for family or academic reasons. Put ourselves in their shoes. These are kids. 

 We all own faulty attribution. Work to understand situations through better communication to learn why people behave as they do.  

 Lagniappe: via @BBallImmersion "Great offense is multiple actions." 
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