FanPost

Is Attribution Dangerous?


I want to throw out a simple idea. Before, the idea, however, here is the general perception that I get, not necessarily from the BN headliners, but from the game thread and post-game thread dialogs, that make me think...

  • Tyler Honeycutt only cares about himself and his NBA prospects.
  • Reeves Nelson is selfish, emotional, and uncontrolled.
  • Our team "doesn't try" for a full game.
  • Our team is "physically deficient" compared to other teams; we just don't have the athletic prowess to match up with other teams because we don't have enough "lateral footspeed" or quickness.
  • etc. I am not trying to be comprehensive here, just give a feel for the types of comments that have caused me to think.
I could go on - but my point is this: as a community, we make a lot of attributions about two things:
  1. the motives and intents of our players, and
  2. the raw physical abilities of our players.
When we make these links - eg, Honeycutt had a bad game because he doesn't care about anything other than the pros - do we create expectations that we then see? Do we make the fundamental attribution error --- overestimating the importance of personal characteristics rather than what the situation is?
I wonder sometimes whether we become prisoners of our own conclusions that we jump to in watching sports. For example, in our final four years, at the time, I genuinely thought that we overachieved based on a relative "talent deficiency" to the other top teams. In hindsight, that was probably stupid, and the ability to coach six games in a row and be flexible to change defensive scheme for a five-shooter team was probably a lot more important.
Anyways...needed to get these thoughts out of my head, as frustrating as they can be I really like this team and don't want to sell short their potential or question their character. I believe Lee's leadership is shaping these other guys, and we will see less of the stupid comments that came out in this post-game in the future...


This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.

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