Kremlinology

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.  Sometimes, your own! 

There is a natural human tendency towards kremlinology – that is, the attempt to impute motives by observing only a few characteristics or outputs.  In one application, it is called Fundamental Attribution Error, when we assert that someone has ill motives just because we are harmed by their action.

It’s a form of conspiracy theory, as we try to connect the dots on someone’s actions to help us understand what’s happening out of our sight.  But we often miss an important safety check.  Once we understand someone’s motives – or think we do! – we should be able to reverse engineer the observed outcomes.

That is, if we observe outputs A, B, and C, we might assert that someone really disliked us, and they were out to “get us.”  But let’s flip the scenario:  Assume that they did dislike you, and wanted to “get you.”  Are actions A, B, and C the actions that they would take, consistent with their past behaviors?  Maybe if they were really trying to harm you, actions D, E, and F make more sense based on how they’ve acted – if so, maybe your hypothesis is incorrect.

Much like doing homework, the principle of “check your work” still applies – run the problem backward and see if your answer fits the problem as observed.