Fundamental Attribution Error

Definition

The fundamental attribution error describes perceivers' tendency to underestimate the impact of situational factors on human behavior and to overestimate the impact of dispositional factors. For instance, people often tend to believe that aggressive behavior is caused by aggressive personality characteristics (dispositional factor) even though aggressive behavior can also be provoked by situational circumstances (situational factor).

History

The term fundamental attribution error was created in 1977 by social psychologist Lee Ross. However, research on the fundamental attribution error goes back to the 1950s when social psychologists Fritz Heider and Gustav Ichheiser started to investigate lay perceivers' understanding of the causes of human behavior. Interest in the fundamental attribution error experienced a peak in the 1970s and 1980s when a general notion within social psychology was to discover shortcomings in human judgment.

Notwithstanding its widely accepted significance for social psychology, the fundamental attribution error has also been the subject of controversies regarding its general nature. On the one hand, critics argued that the fundamental attribution error does not occur for everyone under any circumstances, which challenges the adequacy of the label fundamental. On the other hand, critics claimed that there is no unambiguous criterion that could specify the real causes of human behavior, thus challenging the adequacy of the term error. Irrespective of these controversies, the fundamental attribution error is generally regarded as a very important phenomenon for social psychology, as it often leads to surprised reactions to research findings demonstrating a strong impact of situational factors on human behavior.

Evidence

From a general perspective, evidence for the fundamental attribution error comes from three different lines of research. First, numerous studies have shown that people tend to infer stable personality characteristics from observed behavior even when this behavior could also be due to situational factors. For example, students may infer a high level of dispositional anxiety from a fellow student's nervous behavior during a class presentation, even though such nervous behavior may simply be the result of the anxiety-provoking situation. This tendency to draw correspondent dispositional inferences from situationally constrained behavior is usually called the correspondence bias. In the present example, the fundamental attribution error can contribute to the correspondence bias when [Page 368]perceivers do not believe that giving a class presentation is anxiety provoking. Thus, perceivers will infer that the presenter must be an anxious person, even though most people would show the same level of behavioral anxiety during a class presentation.

A second line of research on the fundamental attribution error is concerned with surprised reactions that are often elicited by social psychological findings. Consistent with social psychology's notion that human behavior is strongly influenced by situational factors, several studies have shown that everyday people often do not help other individuals in an emergency situation when other people are present, that everyday people are willing to administer life-threatening electric shocks to other individuals upon request by an experimenter, and that everyday people engage in sadistic, torturing behavior simply because they are assigned to a superior social role. These findings have provoked surprised reactions not only among lay people but also among professional psychologists. One reason for these reactions is that perceivers tend to underestimate how simple changes in the situation can lead everyday people to engage in immoral behavior.

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