Sponsor Area

Attitude And Social Cognition

Question
CBSEENPS12042004

Explain fundamental attribution error giving examples.

Solution

Attribution: It is a systematic process of assigning causes to a person's behaviour.

Fundamental attribution error: An overall tendency for people to give greater weightage to internal factors than to external factors is called fundamental attribution error.

Examples:

  1. The Indians tend to make more external (situational) attribution than American do.
  2. In general, people attribute success to internal factors, such as their ability or hard work.

They attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck, the difficulty of the task and so on.