The FAE

There are so many mistakes you can make in poker. Bad starting cards, terrible reads or taking the pot from a drunken sociopath.

These are but a few.

However, a lot of the less straightforward mistakes stem from a mental blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists, con-men and people who have read one too many books label this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error. Fans of acronyms and people who have gone on one too few dates label it the FAE.

In slightly technical terms, it basically means that when we speculate about a punter's behaviour we make the mistake of overstating the importance of character and underestimating the importance of situation.

Let us give you a real example.

A young male spots an attractive female on the dance floor of a night club. He plucks up enough courage to approach her.

He dances onto the dance floor and creates a window of opportunity. After a few minutes of steady eye contact and mutually attuned hip movements, he leans close to her ear.

He whispers:

I really like your hair. How did you get it looking like that?

She leans forward and barks back:

I went to the hairdresser's and gone it done.

How did you get yours looking like that?

Did you put your head in a cardboard box for ten years?

He is forced to slope back to his deeply sympathetic male peer group and says:

'She's a lesbian.'

That is an example of the FAE.

It is a dispositional explanation of the woman's behaviour. He should have gone for a contextual explanation: she didn't like him and she is in an environment where there is plenty of choice available.

Even if you were to explain that to our poorly groomed friend, he'd still want to believe she preferred to whistle in the wheat field.

Most of us instinctively want to believe that the world can be explained in terms of people's essential attributes and character.

If you want to think like that, fine, go ahead.

But if you want improve your hairstyle and your poker game, you have to be more aware of situation and context.

Start off with your own game:

did you really lose last night because you were unlucky, or were you subject to one bad beat

which made you tilt and leak money?

did you win the most out of that last hand when you had the best cards or did you over-bet because you were greedy and didn't take time to put the other guy on a hand?

are you really playing good starting cards or are you a little pie-eyed and keen for action?

Then the games of your fellow players:

is that guy who raises with 8-4os really a fish or he is simply someone sensitive to how the table feels and know he can buy pots?

is that guy really good or his simply waiting for the nuts?

was that guy lucky to hit his draw or did you give him a great chance of doing so?

By considering context over character you may begin to improve your game and stop overestimating the world's population of lesbians.