Fundamental Attribution Error

The Fundamental Attribution Error is when people are explaining someone else’s behavior to mainly focus on the personal factors (traits) of the person and underestimate the impact of the situation the person is in (Ross et al., 1977).

There was a study conducted by Lee Ross and his colleagues which demonstrated the fundamental attribution error in a setting of a quiz game with spectators. Participants of the study were randomly assigned (by the flip of a coin) to play the role of either the questioner or the contestant. The experiment gave the task of the questioners to write 10 challenging questions of things they specifically knew about (Ross et al., 1977).

Questions like: Who was the founder of e-Bay? What team won the NHL Stanley Cup in 1976?

With such specific questions, the contestants of the games only managed to answer about 40% of the questions correctly. After the game though, all participants (questioners, contestants, and observers) rated the questioners’ and contestants’ general knowledge on a scale from 0 to 100.

The questioners appeared more knowledge than the contestants, because of the fact that they were the one choosing questions they specifically knew about-not because they were in fact more knowledgeable or smarter than the contestants. In fact there was no difference between the questioners and contestants on an objective test of general knowledge. 

All three types of participants rated the questioners as being more knowledgeable than the contestants. In fact the spectators of the quiz game rated the questioners as above average in their general knowledge and rated the contestants as below average. Even the contestants  rated themselves as below average in general knowledge and rated their partners’ general knowledge as higher than average.They overlooked the situation of the questioners making up the questions and overestimated the questioner’s knowledge, a personal cause (Ross et al., 1997). 

Despite knowing about the situations a person is in and its impact on their behavior in general people fall prey to the fundamental attribution error even when they are aware of the situation and its impact on another’s behavior (Miller et al., 1981).

People’s behavior in general is more influenced by the situation they are in (Ross et al., 1997). 

My Example:

My sister, is a very social, friendly, and outgoing person. She like meeting new people and she likes talking to people, a trait we share. Last year my sister visited me here in Texas for a few days.

I gave her a heads up that it takes a while for my friends to feel comfortable around people and so when they first meet new people they tend to be rather quiet because they’re uncomfortable. When she met my friends for less than 5 minutes, she tried to talk to them like she would do with anyone she has known for a while. My friends honestly did not say much to her and overall were very quiet.

As soon as we left, my sister’s first words were to me were “they’re very shy” In less than five minutes of knowing a group of people my sister thought she had figured out the reason for my friends quiet behavior.  She attributed their quiet behavior to their supposed shy personalities, not the situation of meeting someone new.

Even now, though I have explained to my sister several times that my friends were only quiet around her because they didn’t know her, she still doesn’t believe that my friends can be talkative, loud, and at time outgoing. 

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References

Miller, A. G., Jones, E. E., & Hinkles, S. (1981). A robust attribution error in the personality domain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 587-600.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1997). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322-336.