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Fundamental attribution error
When explaining other people’s behaviour, people tend to overestimate internal factors, such as personality, and underestimate situational ones.
When someone makes a mistake, investigate the flow before blaming the person.
When someone makes a mistake, we explain it by the person’s character. When we make one, we explain it by the situation. Lee RossNamed the fundamental attribution error and ran the quiz game experiment in which the randomly assigned advantage vanishes from the judgement.2 references in this work:1977The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings1977Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processesSee in the bibliography → named this asymmetry in 1977, and it is the root of a phrase that shows up in every product team: “the user didn’t get it”. Almost always it is the interface that didn’t explain. The practical cost of this is that the wrong attribution leads to the wrong solutions, of the punitive rather than preventive kind, such as more warnings, more confirmations and more training, when what would solve it was changing the flow that produced the error.
What the brain does with it
The biological mechanism behind the effect, and how much of it was actually measured.
When explaining another person’s behaviour, we give too much weight to what they are and too little to the situation they were in. And, when the behaviour is ours, we flip it. The explanation with most support is that attribution to traits is spontaneous and cheap, whereas considering the context demands an extra step that only happens if there is time and willingness. It is a social-processing effect, and the mentalising networkThe circuit that infers what goes on in other people’s heads: intentions, beliefs, desires. It is what comes into play when the interface has people on the other side, in the rating, in the comment, in the count of those who have already bought.See it in The social mind →See in the glossary → is the closest structure, measured in attribution of intention, not in this bias.
The body this law presumes
Who it was measured on, and what changes when the body on the other side is another.
ChoiGathered, with Nisbett and Norenzayan, the evidence that collectivist cultures attribute less cause to the person and more to the situation.One reference in this work:1999Causal attribution across cultures: variation and universalitySee in the bibliography →, Nisbett and Norenzayan gathered in 1999 the evidence that collectivist cultures commit this error less, above all when the situational cause is in plain sight. One caveat has to come with it. When the experiment gives the person being judged no choice, the bias shows up strongly in East Asia too, so part of the difference may be down to the method and not the culture.
How design translates it
What to do with it on a screen, without turning a finding into a rule.
How to measure this in your product
The bias shows up in blaming the user: when someone does not understand the interface, it is said that “the user got it wrong”, instead of investigating the flow, the information architecture or the language. Recognising the bias is a condition for adopting an investigative stance and for writing error messages that accuse nobody. “You typed the wrong CPF” and “We don’t recognise this CPF; check the digits” say the same thing, and only the second lets the person carry on without feeling stupid.
Where it breaks
Where the law does not hold, holds less, or holds in reverse.
Flipping the bias also has a cost. Treating every error as a confusing flow hides the cases where the person was led on purpose, and then it was not confusion, it was a design trap (dark pattern).
Um caso
A real product where this showed up, with what happened and where to check it.
The quiz where the host looks smarter
Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz randomly assigned students to two roles: who would ask the questions and who would answer. The questioners wrote their own questions, free to pick subjects they knew well. Afterwards, those who answered rated the general knowledge of both, and in a second experiment those who only watched did the same. Contestants and observers rated the questioners as far better informed; the questioners themselves did not give themselves that advantage, because they knew where it came from. Everyone had seen the draw. Everyone knew the questions were chosen by whoever asked them. And even so the structural advantage vanished from the judgement of those on the other side of it, and what was left was a reading of the person. It is exactly what happens in the meeting where someone says the user “didn’t read it”. The asymmetry of context disappears and the judgement of character remains.
Ross; Amabile; Steinmetz, 1977
Neighbouring concepts
Structures linked by a bridge of my own
Sibling concepts
Fontes
Enunciado citado de Ross, 1977.
- ROSS, L. The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, v. 10, p. 173-220, 1977. DOI
- ROSS, L.; AMABILE, T. M.; STEINMETZ, J. L. Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, v. 35, n. 7, p. 485-494, 1977. DOI
Leitura complementar: Erro fundamental de atribuição Wikipédia