There’s a cognitive shortcut we humans all seem to fall into using — culture? human nature? — that runs something like this:
- There are good guys and bad guys; this is characteristic of a person, not an action.
- Nations are people, and as such are possessed of a single mind, personality, and moral status.
Both of these shortcuts are false, but we lean on them.
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@inthehands
You might be thinking of a phenomenon called The Fundamental Attribution Error
@nomi Not precisely, but closely related. See also research on how people tend to see positives as personality traits but negatives as situation for ingroup, and the effect switches for outgroup