fundamental attribution error: a standalone construct

Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris demonstrated the effect in 1967 in The attribution of attitudes: even when observers were told an essay writer had been assigned which position to argue, they still inferred that the essay matched the writer's true opinion, over-attributing the behavior to the person and discounting the situation that compelled it. Lee Ross named the pattern in 1977, calling it the fundamental attribution error, the tendency of an observer to explain another person's actions by stable dispositions such as character or attitude while under-weighting the situational forces acting on that person. Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone reviewed the accumulated evidence in 1995 under the alternative label correspondence bias and traced it to a two-stage process in which observers automatically draw a dispositional inference and only sometimes, and effortfully, correct it for the situation. The construct is a landmark in attribution theory because it identifies a systematic and repeatable asymmetry in everyday causal reasoning, one that has been documented across many tasks and cultures and that operates most strongly when observers judge others rather than themselves.[1][2][3]

Unit

The gap between the dispositional attribution an observer makes and the weaker attribution warranted once known situational constraints are taken into account

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed experimentally by holding a target's behavior constant while varying whether observers know it was situationally constrained, then comparing the dispositional inferences observers report on rating scales