“Two kinds of people” – fundamental attribution errors, shaping the rules and “the clap clinic”

Okay, so this cartoon below is amusing, but also limited.

It’s limited because it assumes that behaviour is mostly shaped by “what kind of person you are” (this is known in the trade as the fundamental attribution error).

The problem with the FAE (or one of them) is that it leads to fatalism/shoulder-shrugging by people who are staging events – they believe they can’t easily stop abuse of spaces, not without coming over as “the heavy.” This is wrong. There’s a really really simple way of crowd-sourcing the time-keeping. It’s known (by some) as ‘the clap clinic’.

You can read more about it here.

But god forbid organisers ever take responsibility, and maybe offend some of the sages on whose reflected “glory” they rely. We’re so screwed, for so many (bigger than this) reasons.