Fundamental Attribution Error

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior—where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor–observer bias.

There was some great research by Jonathan Haskel at Imperial College where he showed that most of the productivity growth in the 1980s occurred through firms entering and exiting the market rather than from individual firms improving their productivity. And what that tells us is that the ability of managers to make their company more efficient is perhaps not as great as we think… we overestimate the ability of managers to improve their companies. It was Warren Buffett who said that when a manager with a great reputation takes over a business with a bad reputation, it’s the business that keeps its reputation

There’ve been many attempts to detect the difference made by ‘top’ managers. It’s hard to find. What’s more, big companies hiring big talent overwhelmingly die out. From this we might conclude that the best chief executives money can buy are mostly competitively stuffed by ingénues and impersonal market forces

There’s definitely been a change if we look back since the 1920s. Then the idea of a CEO was a good administrator. And, remember, the MBA is still administrator, master of business administration. But then in the 60s, 70s and 80s it changed and you can track some of the changes by the extent to which CEOs, their faces appear on the cover of business magazines like Business Week and Fortune, and that’s been steadily increasing since the 80s. There’s been a change in emphasis also of what the CEO is supposed to do. So previously they were like the engineer, the really smart guys; they were supposed to coordinate and plan. But now they’re supposed to have a vision, they’re supposed to change the company, revolutionise it by a transformational approach, by being visionary, setting out new goals, getting people to follow them.

All the evidence shows that when a team changes its manager, it doesn’t much improve; and this tells us that managers can’t affect the performance of their team to the extent that people think and yet it is always the case that we want the manager out whenever our team runs into a run of bad form

In terms of any individual game, then obviously a good team has a good chance of beating a bad team clearly. But there’s always a probability that the smaller team will win, and what happens after the result is that we adopt the hindsight bias and suddenly decide that the outcome was inevitable when that’s not the case.

It’s a sign of real leadership to admit what individuals can’t do – not that politics encourages such candour. Every person who stands in the election has got to promise a better tomorrow. They’re not actually going to promise a deeper abyss. Though once again Churchill was an exception – when France fell, Churchill’s famous broadcast is “The news from France is very bad.” He didn’t try to cover it up – he said it really is an appalling situation we’re in. Now that tends to mark out the great leaders when they do that.

Margaret Thatcher- Thatcherism?. It’s personalised in her - but at the same time if what she was able to do didn’t tap into a real popular desire for change, then that change would have been resisted and it wouldn’t really have happened. It’s something about good leadership, isn’t it? That good leadership is as much - certainly in the political sense - is as much being able to tap into the mood of the day

Collectivist or individualist

Believing that when people get together, they can achieve change even if they’re relatively powerless people, and they don’t necessarily have to look to a single leader; whereas individualism does speak to a more selfishness and competitiveness rather than cooperation. It also draws to some extent on experience and also on history and realising that changes have come about when people got together and decided there had to be change. Things like the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement.

What the Left has been doing here is grasping at the simplest possible explanation for its own failures. Now if you can believe that people are Right Wing only because of the influence of the Murdoch press, then you’re able to distract yourself from the possibility that they don’t agree with your beliefs for some other reasons. It could be that your own beliefs aren’t actually right or it could be that the British public are Right Wing for reasons not to do with the Murdoch press - to do with other ideological factors.

As it is, the whole battle between Carlyle’s Great Man theory and the determinists’ view, the vast impersonal forces view, is apolitical because the Right has the concept of the invisible hand in the market, the Adam Smith idea, and it also has the idea of The Little Platoons, Edmund Burke’s concept that decisions are and should be taken by thousands of smaller groupuscules in society which are not led by individuals. Equally, of course, you do have the dead hand of the Marxist analysis in which history is driven by the concept of the movement towards the dictatorship of the proletariats, which is not something that can be slowed down or sped up by individuals particularly.

In politics and certainly in military history, one can’t ignore the power of the individual. If Hitler’s parents hadn’t met, it’s unlikely that Germany would have invaded Russia in 1941, certainly not necessarily in the way that it did. And so it’s completely impossible to ignore what Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle called The Great Man theory of history, but equally of course it doesn’t have all the answers.

“Who is in charge of the clattering train? The Axles creak and the couplings strain. For the pace is hot, and the points are near, And Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear; And signals flash through the night in vain. For Death is in charge of the clattering train!” And you often have to ask in politics, “Who is in charge of the clattering train?”