Fundamental+Attribution+Error

toc = Definition: = The tendency to give more attention to dispositional factors than is appropriate for a situation. Gen Psych, Chapter 14, Pg. 441

= Examples: = When waiting in line to make a purchase, witnessing an unsatisfactory transaction between the store clerk and a customer who is ahead of us may cause us to expect our own transaction to be unsatisfactory as well.

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=In the News:= [|Barack Obama and The Fundamental Attribution Error] In high school psychology, students learn about an odd tendency of the human condition, the so-called “fundamental attribution error.” We people are hard wired, it seems, to overvalue the personality-based reasons for someone’s behavior, while under-valuing the circumstantial reasons. If a waitress is rude, our instinct is to assume she is a bad person, not that there are circumstances (a home foreclosure, a divorce, a sick child) that would explain the rudeness. When a hedge fund manager hits a jackpot, we assume he is just more brilliant, not that he got lucky.

[|'Those Idiots!': Bureaucracy and the Fundamental Attribution Error] One day, after being sent home on a mandatory furlough, a group of employees at the Arizona Department of Security were being paid overtime to catch up on their backlog. “Only in government,” State Senator Russell Pearce told the //Arizona Republic//. “That sounds like a bureaucratic quagmire where they are not thinking.”Ah, yes, let’s round up the usual suspect: the unthinking bureaucrat.

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