I don't like car crashes

Writing on Twitter has brought to high relief one of the irritating aspects of journalism. People conclude that because you've reported a fact you support it or because you've passed along a comment from someone else that you are ignorant to the motivations behind that person's comment.

So when I passed along that RNC Chairman Michael Steele was sending out emails asking people to send virtual tea bags to Barack Obama many people wrote in to criticize me for supporting the idea. Actually I thought the idea was silly on its face and assumed everyone else would too.

A Twitter about an event does not = approval of event. Ex: "A car crashed in the road" does not = I like car crashes. Nor does passing along a quote from a man in the street yelling "The world will end tomorrow" mean that I believe him or that I think he's a rare genius. Sometimes I might respect you enough to let you figure out what a person is saying and stay out of it.

This isn't the first time this has happened. It happens all the time when I write longer pieces. Today I learned there's a formal name for it from the always excellent Frontal Cortex post about business books which pointed me to this Wikipedia page on the Fundamental attribution error which included this experiment:

Classic demonstration study: Jones and Harris (1967)

Based on an earlier theory developed by Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis, Jones and Harris hypothesized that people would attribute apparently freely-chosen behaviors to disposition, and apparently chance-directed behaviors to situation. The hypothesis was confounded by the fundamental attribution error.

Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays. Subjects were asked to rate the pro-Castro attitudes of the writers. When the subjects believed that the writers freely chose the positions they took (for or against Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favor of Castro as having a more positive attitude toward Castro. However, contradicting Jones and Harris' initial hypothesis, when the subjects were told that the writer's positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him. In other words, the subjects were unable to see the influence of the situational constraints placed upon the writers; they could not refrain from attributing sincere belief to the writers.