What is a Fundamental Attribution Error?

The development of creative processes is profoundly hampered by a human, individualistic, and internalistic approach that mistakenly attributes emergent ecosystemic outcomes solely to the individual and their internal qualities (traits). In regards to creativity, this goes back to the initial development of this concept in the 1800’s as a form of Romanticism’s logic of the “Genius.”

It’s not that the individual does not exist – that we are just an epiphenomenon of the highly distributed relational dynamics of some system. It is simply that we exist of and through intra-dependencies that can be profoundly changed but cannot be removed.

“There is no autonomous subjectivity… Agency, when embodied in living beings, can acquire experiential content… but this awareness of agency, characteristic of human bodies, is largely an illusion. There is no agent apart from action. Agency is not a permanent feature or property that someone has independently of situated actions, but the emergent product of material engagement… as a creative tension of mind and matter or flow and form.” (Malafouris)

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See Traits, Configuration, God Model, Romantic Creation, Bio-Enculturated