23.2: The Fundamental Attribution Error

Explaining Why People Do What They Do

We are often more interested in other people and what makes them tick than in anything else. Why do they do the things that they do? What led several hundred people at Jonestown to die by suicide? Why did so many of the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience administer (what they thought were) severe shocks to the learner? Why is it so believable that people did nothing while Kitty Genovese was murdered? Such questions also arise closer to home. Why did Sally give Wilbur that weird look when he said that they should go out again soon? In fact, we often have occasion to wonder why we do some of the things that we do: why in the world did I say that?

Patty Hearst

On Friday, February 4, 1974 Patty Hearst, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy San Francisco publishing family, was kidnapped by a terrorist group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (the SLA). She was abused and tortured and kept—bound and blindfolded—in a closet for 57 days. It is not surprising that she was terrified.

What is surprising is what happened next. Hearst began to identify with her captors. She renamed herself ‘Tania’, and carried a machine gun into a San Francisco bank and held it on the customers while other members of the SLA robbed the place. Even twenty months after her rescue, she continued to defend the views of the group. Why did she do this? There was nothing in her past to indicate that she would have any sympathy with a radical group like the SLA, and even the people who knew her best couldn’t understand it.

There probably isn’t any simple explanation for her actions, but there are two general types of answers. First, perhaps she was one of those rare people who gets swept up in such things; she had a weak character and wasn’t strong enough to resist.

This may well be part of the story, but a very different sort of answer is possible. It may be that many kidnapping victims begin to identify with their kidnappers after a time. In fact, there is a name for this phenomenon: it is called the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (after a 1973 incident in Stockholm in which robbers held four people captive in a bank vault for six days; after several days, the victims began to establish a bond with their captors). Some psychologists claim that such behavior is a not uncommon attempt to cope with the uncertainty and terror in the situation. But we won’t be concerned here with which explanation of Hearst’s behavior is correct (quite possibly both get at part of the truth). Our interest is in the two, quite different types of explanations illustrated in this paragraph.

Internal vs. External Causes

We can try to explain Hearst’s behavior by citing “internal” causes (her character traits, e.g., being weak and impressionable) or by citing “external” causes (the fact that many people in a terrifying situation like hers start to identify with their captors to cope with their terror). More generally, we can divide the causes of peoples’ actions into two sorts:

Internal Causes: Causes “inside” the person: their personality traits or dispositions, attitudes, values, desires.

1. Rashad returned the lost billfold because he is honest and helpful.
2. Penelope yelled at Carl because she was angry.
3. Hai gave me that weird look because he’s an extremely creepy individual.

External Causes: Causes “outside” the person: features of the situation in which the person acts.

1. Rashad said that line 2 matched line A because of the strong social pressure exerted by the other people in the experiment.
2. Penelope didn’t help the victim because the situation was one in which it was unclear whether the victim needed help and no one else at the scene seemed to think that he did.
3. Hai followed the leader’s orders, but anyone else would have done the same thing in those circumstances.

All actions take place in some context or situation, and both a person’s internal states (dispositions, attitudes, etc.) and features of the situation (e.g., the presence of others, the commands of an authority figure) play a role in determining what he does in that situation. It is never the case that internal causes aren’t important. But as we will see, people strongly overestimate the strength of internal causes while underestimating the strength of external ones.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

All these cases—mobs, helping, conformity, obedience, the prison study— illustrate the power of the situation. But we tend to underestimate this power. This is such a large and common bias in our reasoning about other people that it has been given a name: the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error occurs because of our strong tendency to overestimate the significance of internal causes and to underestimate the power of external (situational) causes. The fundamental attribution error gets its name from the fact that we often make this mistake when we are trying to attribute a person’s actions to causes of one kind or another. For example, we commit this error if we focus too much on whether a wouldbe helper is a helpful sort of person (thus attributing their behavior to an internal cause) while overlooking features of the situation like the fact that other people are present (thus ignoring external causes).

The Fundamental Attribution Error in the Laboratory

People commit the fundamental attribution error in the real world and in the psychological laboratory. In various studies, subjects listen to someone give a speech in which they read an essay that was written by the experimenter. The speech defends some cause, like the legalization of marijuana. Even when subjects were told that the person was required to give the speech and that it may not reflect their true view, they are strongly inclined to believe that it really does reflect the speaker’s views. In this case, the subjects do not take the situation adequately into account (the other person was required to give this speech, and almost anyone would do the same thing in such circumstances).

In another experiment, Lee Ross and his collaborators had subjects play a quiz game. It was clear to everyone involved that subjects were randomly assigned to be either the questioner or the contestant. The questioner was instructed to devise ten difficult factual questions based on their own knowledge which they were then to ask the contestant. The questioners were at a very great advantage, since they picked the questions based on their own background and expertise (which the contestants were unlikely to share).

But despite this clear situational advantage, observers, questioners, and even the contestant themselves rated the questioners as more knowledgeable and intelligent than the contestants. People underestimated the power of this situation—the advantage of those who got to make up the questions—and overestimated the extent to which the contestants’ behavior reflected their traits or characteristics (like being intelligent or knowledgeable).

Another way to see the point is that the results would have been quite different if the questioner and the contestant had exchanged roles; then the people who seemed smarter would have seemed less intelligent, and vice versa. The situation is such that the questioner—whoever it is—will look better, but people tend to overlook this fact. When they do, they commit the fundamental attribution error.

The Fundamental Attribution Error in the Real World

When we first hear about bystanders who witness harm, but don’t help or the people in the Milgram study who administered ever-greater shocks, we are first inclined to think they are uncaring, cruel or sadistic. When we do so, we attribute their behavior to internal causes (their uncaringness, cruelty or sadism). We overlook the fact that the situations are very powerful and that many people—perhaps even us—would act the same way in those situations. When we do this, we commit the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error is also encouraged by the belief that people have relatively stable traits that strongly influence how they will behave in a wide range of settings: Wilbur is honest, and he would behave in an honest way in almost any circumstances. But it turns out that people’s traits aren’t as robust as we usually assume. There is not as much consistency in people’s behavior from one type of situation to another as we commonly suppose. The moral psychologist John Doris has dubbed this view, “situationism.”

What the Fundamental Attribution Error Does Not Mean

Before proceeding, it is important to note two things that do not follow from the fundamental attribution error. First, the claim is not that everyone is the same. People do differ, and these differences help account for why they do the things that they do. If virtually everyone in a situation would do the same thing, e.g., eat grasshoppers when an experimenter pressures them to, then the fact that a person ate some grasshoppers doesn’t tell us much about them.

On the other hand, if somebody does something that most people would not do in that same situation, their action does tell us something about them. For example, most people in Ben Affleck’s position would not have gotten that back tattoo, so the fact that he did tells us something about him. The point is not that we should never attribute behavior to internal causes, but that we tend to overattribute it to internal causes.

Second, the fact that situations are more powerful than we often suppose does not mean that people are not responsible for what we do (“It’s not my fault: the situation made me do it”). Some people help even when others are present. Some people refuse to go on shocking an innocent victim. Some Europeans hid Jews during World War II in the face of strong social pressures and grave physical dangers. Indeed, the hope is that by learning about the power of the situation, we will be better at resisting that power. Learning about the frequent failure of people in groups to help someone in need should make it easier for us to realize the importance of stopping to help. And learning about the Milgram experiment should make it easier for us to stop and ask, when someone in authority tells us to do something that seems questionable, whether we should comply.

Consequences of the Fundamental Attribution Error

The fundamental attribution error is a very common bias in our reasoning about other people, and it can lead us astray in several ways.

1. It leads us to think that they are more consistent than they are.
2. It leads us to think that we can do a better job of predicting their behavior based on their traits than we can.
   • We would often do better basing our prediction on our knowledge of the situation.
3. It leads us to think that we have a better understanding of human behavior than we do.

But the fundamental attribution error also suggests some more positive lessons. It is important to raise people with good characters. But since behavior is more strongly influenced by situations than we often suppose, it is also important to design social settings and situations in a way that is likely to bring out the best in people, rather than the worst.