Attribution
The Basic Idea
Imagine you are driving to work and you get cut off by another car. You start to feel angry and deem this driver a careless, selfish person with a lack of concern for the safety of others. The very next day, you are on your way to meet a client at a new location. Not being familiar with the area, you cut someone off to avoid a wrong turn. You rationalize this decision because it was an exception, not something you do regularly; you are usually a safe and thoughtful driver.
In these two scenarios, you attributed different causes to the two acts of unsafe driving. We make similar attributions on a daily basis to explain the behavior of ourselves and others. In psychology, attribution theory attempts to understand how people form relationships between events, internal characteristics, and behaviors. As the aforementioned example demonstrates, people tend to be more understanding of their own behaviors and attribute them to the situation instead of an inherent characteristic. With others, we tend to make dispositional attributions, believing their behavior is caused by personal characteristics.1
The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.
– Canadian journalist Malcom Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference2
