The quizmaster was asked to generate five questions from his idiosyncratic knowledge, with the stipulation that he knew the correct answer to all five questions. The students were described as having been randomly assigned to the role of either quizmaster or contestant by drawing straws. This error is very closely related to another attributional tendency, the correspondence bias, which occurs when we attribute behaviors to people’s internal characteristics, even in heavily constrained situations. In one demonstration of the fundamental attribution error, Linda Skitka and her colleagues (Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, & Chamberlin, 2002) had participants read a brief story about a professor who had selected two student volunteers to come up in front of a class to participate in a trivia game. When we tend to overestimate the role of person factors and overlook the impact of situations, we are making a mistake that social psychologists have termed the fundamental attribution error.

That is, we are more likely to say “Cejay left a big tip, so he must be generous” than “Cejay left a big tip, but perhaps that was because he was trying to impress his friends.” Second, we also tend to make more personal attributions about the behavior of others (we tend to say, “Cejay is a generous person”) than we do for ourselves (we tend to say, “I am generous in some situations but not in others”).

First, we are too likely to make strong personal attributions to account for the behavior that we observe others engaging in. This is a classic example of the general human tendency of underestimating how important the social situation really is in determining behavior. One way that our attributions may be biased is that we are often too quick to attribute the behavior of other people to something personal about them rather than to something about their situation.

General features of actor observer bias