The Fundamental Attribution Error

Last night you were in a bar with friends and you met Jessica. She is one of your friend’s classmates and friendly you have tried to engage a conversation with her several times but she wasn’t really open to it. You spent a great night after all but once at home you were convinced : Jessica is unfriendly. Something you don’t know is that Jessica had an unpleasant day and doesn’t usually appreciate to go out in bars because she finds them too noisy. In other words, the situation you met Jessica wasn’t favorable to appreciate her everyday character and your current evaluation of her is biased.

This phenomenon has been named by Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz (1977) : the fundamental attribution error. It represents the ability of people to underestimate the characteristics of a situation compared to the characteristics of a person to form a judgement about him or her.

To demonstrate that idea, they conduct an experiment, in the form of a quiz game, with 36 pairs of students assigned to one role each : a questioner and a contestant. The questioners were asked to prepare 10 « challenging but not impossible » questions on themes they had interest or expertise. Those questions were submitted to the contestant in a second phase. The number of correct answers made by the contestant was then recorded. After the quiz, questioners and contestants rated their own and their partner’s general knowledge.

Given the nature of the task, designed to favor questioners’ self-presentation over contestants, the authors expected the number of correct answers to be low. That hypothesis has been confirmed : contestants have answered correctly to, on average, 4 out of 10 questions. Moreover, the important mesure of that experiment is the general knowledge evaluation. In the majority of cases, contestants rated themselves less positively than their partner : on a 100-points’ scale, contestants’ average rate of their general knowledge is 41.3 versus 66.8 for their partners. Those results don’t follow the same pattern for the questioners : they evaluated themselves only slightly superior to their partners (53.5 on average versus 50.6 for the contestants’ rate).

The researchers replicate that experiment with performers playing the exact same interactions between questioners and contestants. It was then objective observers who had to evaluate the general knowledge of each person of the pairs. The results of that second experiment are following those of the contestants’ in the first study.

According to the authors, general knowledge rates demonstrate a bias in the evaluation of the members of the pairs. The contestants and the observers failed to understand that the situation was in favor of the questioners : one can easily assume that if the situation was reversed, questioners becoming contestants would have failed to answer as often as the first ones. That experiment is an evidence for the fundamental attribution error theory : situational characteristics  (self-presentation of the questioners and the contestants) have been underestimated by the contestants and the observers who rather attributed the failure to a lack of general knowledge which is a individual characteristic.

Knowing about the fundamental attribution theory is useful in everyday life : you wouldn’t have judged Jessica so quickly if you were aware that the context of an interaction can widely interfere with the actors’ behavior. Other studies conducted by Philip Zimbardo or Stanley Milgram also emphasize the importance of the situation in the emergence of some cruel or violent behaviors that can be at the opposite of the normal or moral conduct of some people.

It is something that we have to keep in mind to avoid intuitive conclusions and to develop a wider look about people we just met : everyone can be good or bad depending on the situation. Psychologists really need to take into account the situational characteristics, as much as personal and cultural characteristics, to fully understand a pathology, a behavior, an interaction, etc…