ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the difficult task of persuading someone that there is no such thing as character or ‘personality.’ Thinking otherwise in quite a strong way is the essence of this particular bias. Committing the Fundamental Attribution Error means making this mistake of looking more to someone’s putative personality to explain their behaviour than to what they think is going on around them. In other words, the prisoner could now see that the context drove his behaviour more than any personality variables. Andrews argues that “folk psychology includes the notion that some behaviour is explained by personality traits,” as is consistent with the Fundamental Attribution Error. Central to a thick notion of personality is the suggestion that if people have a certain characteristic, they will exhibit that characteristic across different contexts. There are, though, some tendencies which could perhaps be referred to under the rubrics ‘character’ or ‘personality.’
