Review of: Lankford, A. (2013) The myth of martyrdom: What really drives suicide bombers, rampage shooters, and other self-destructive killers. Palgrave Macmillan.
In Press, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (published version may differ slightly)
In 1977, the social psychologist Lee Ross coined the term “fundamental attribution error” to describe the putative tendency of people to overestimate the importance of dispositional causes of behavior, such as personality traits and political attitudes, and underestimate the importance of situational causes, such as social pressure or objective circumstances. Over the decades since, the term has firmly rooted itself into the conventional wisdom of social psychology, to the point where it is sometimes identified as the field’s basic insight (Ross & Nisbett 2011). However, the actual research evidence purporting to demonstrate this error is surprisingly weak (see, e.g., Funder 1982; Funder & Fast 2010; Krueger & Funder 2004), and at least one well-documented error (the “false…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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