Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity or error.
Hanlon's razor works because incompetence is more common than malice, and because assuming malice provokes it. It fails where the actor has a demonstrated pattern, at which point the razor is a way of not looking.
In practice
- A payment that never arrived is far more often a wrong sort code than a decision to withhold.
- A colleague who ignored your message probably has 340 unread ones, and treating it as a snub creates the conflict it assumed.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought