Group attribution error

Biological Parallel

When a single honeybee from a hive stings a bear, the bear treats the entire colony as hostile—a sensible heuristic when colonies coordinate via pheromone alarms. But when a rogue bee stings due to individual stress, the attribution error costs the bear access to honey from a non-aggressive hive. Natural selection calibrates this bias to environmental structure: in highly coordinated superorganisms (ants, bees, termites), individual behavior DOES predict group traits. The error emerges when we apply superorganism heuristics to loosely-coupled groups—like judging an entire company by one employee's email.