As you are your newlywed friends move into their new home, you hear them arguing as they try to edge the king-sized bed frame through the bedroom doorway. the frame gets jammed and you automatically attribute the jam to the couple "being poor communicators" rather than attributing the failure to get the frame through the doorway to the possibility that it might be too big for the doorway. this is an example of:

The correct answer is "The fundamental attribution error".

Explanation:

The fundamental attribution error is the human tendency to emphasize personal characteristics instead of analyzing the contextual or situational explanation for other people's behavior.

For example, when someone fails a test, the other students may think that their classmate failed because he is lazy or he didn't study enough and not because the questions of the test were wrongly formulated.

In this particular case, the first attribution that one does to the jam is that the couple did it because they are bad communicators, only because they were arguing moments before, rather than attributing the failure to get the frame to through the doorway to the possibility that it might be too big for the doorway.

In conclusion, this is an example of the fundamental attribution error.

as university of miami psychologists debra lieberman and adam smith pointed out in a recent article in the journal current directions in psychological science, humans have social and psychological mechanisms to deter incest. with very few exceptions, marriages between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children are verboten in every human culture. the primary psychological anti-incest mechanism is the yuck response. even the idea of sex with their mom or dad, bro or sis is upsetting to most people. the psychologist jonathan haidt has found that nearly everyone is repelled by the prospect of brother-sister sex, even in hypothetical situations in which there is no chance of pregnancy).

the biological cost of incest

this raises an interesting question: just what’s so bad about incest? sure, having sex with your dad or your sister seems gross — but why? some anthropologists have argued that incest taboos are learned social conventions. this explanation, however, doesn’t make sense to me as it does not explain the widespread existence of anti-incest mechanisms in creatures ranging from cockroaches to chimpanzees. second, the incest taboo is about as close to a universal law as human moral rules get.

why should mechanisms to avoid incest be so widespread both in nature and across human societies? the answer is simple. the problem with having sex close with relatives is that there is an astonishingly high chance that your offspring will be born with a serious birth defect.

answer; integrative;