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. Let’s consider some of the ways that our attributions may go awry. In fact, causal attributions, including those relating to success and failure, are subject to the same types of biases that any other types of social judgments are.

However, although people are often reasonably accurate in their attributions-we could say, perhaps, that they are “good enough” (Fiske, 2003)-they are far from perfect. Because successful navigation of the social world is based on being accurate, we can expect that our attributional skills will be pretty good. In relation to our preceding discussion of attributions for success and failure, if we can determine why we did poorly on a test, we can try to prepare differently so we do better on the next one. We have seen that person perception is useful in helping us successfully interact with others. Describe victim-blaming attributional biases.Explore group-serving biases in attribution.Outline self-serving attributional biases.Explore the related concepts of the fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias.Review a variety of common attibutional biases, outlining cultural diversity in these biases where indicated.

The actor observer bias suggests that