Fundamental Attribution Error

The picture to the side shows how easy it is to make attribution errors. Judgments about why an event occurred or why someone behaved in a certain way are called attributions. When attributing something or someone, people often tend make mistakes. This is usually known as fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias. This error is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behavior is due to internal and dispositional factors and to disregard external or situational factors.

The picture above illustrates this error. The picture shows of a lady who is giving a man money because she thinks that he is homeless. In doing so, the lady is attributing his disposition to that the fact that he is out on the street and in shabby demeanor that he is homeless. However she is not considering other external factors that could have led him to be out on the streets. The fact that he is a home - a - phobic is something that the lady did not account for when assessing his situation .