Attribution Bias

In psychology, an attribution bias, or attributional error, is a cognitive bias describing the systematic errors people make when evaluating or explaining their own and others' behavior, producing systematic deviations from rationality that lead to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments or illogical interpretations of events. Attributions are the judgments people make about why others behave as they do, but these judgments are not always objective: for example, a driver who is cut off in traffic is often more likely to attribute the other driver's behavior to a fixed personality trait, such as rudeness, than to a situational circumstance, such as being late for work. Attribution bias covers many specific tendencies, including the ultimate attribution error, the fundamental attribution error, the actor-observer bias and hostile attribution bias, each describing a particular pattern in how people reason about the causes of behavior, and the field helps explain how people's preconceptions and mental shortcuts shape their decisions, emotions and actions.