Possum piss

I was the victim of a targeted pissing attack from a vengeful possum. It was the only reasonable conclusion from the evidence. The possum, aggrieved and angry at Matthew Simpson for reasons I would discover later, had revenge in its heart and pissed on me from a great height. All because I happened to walk out of Matt's house. It was a hate crime. I was covered in possum piss, and late for dinner. It was unlikely the police would take a report seriously, so I continued about my day. But a hate crime it definitely was. In retrospect, I may have over-attributed motive and intention to a random animal doing random animal things. But it sure FELT like I was being personally targeted. In this Fink Tank Col talks about our tendency to attribute motives and intentions to situations, as described by Pascal Boyer in his book Minds Make Societies. With a possum, it's pretty easy to see I’m drawing a long bow. The problem is we do it with people too, and it's less obviously unreasonable. We're remarkably good at inventing explanations for other people's behaviour, and remarkably bad at remembering that we invented them.