The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

Type

Book chapter

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1977

DOI

10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60357-3

ISBN

9780120152100

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60357-3

Cited from

decision_science, psychology

Cited by

8 citations across 8 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Fundamental Attribution Error
  • The construct was named by Lee Ross (1977) in his landmark essay "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings," building on foundational attribution theory from Heider (1958) and the correspondent inference theory developed by Jones and Davis (1965).

    This sourceSeminal essay naming the fundamental attribution error and characterizing the systematic over-weighting of dispositional over situational causes; supports D17-061's framing of the construct's origin.

• Reference-Point Dependence
  • The referenced reading is cheaper: the response is a well-behaved function of a difference, and the difference moved because its second term moved.

    This sourceDocuments the default of attributing an anomalous response to the responder's disposition rather than to situational structure.

• Responsibility Attribution
  • The over-weighting of salient, dispositional agents at the expense of situational forces — the pattern the fundamental attribution error names — is visible as a systematic miscalibration of the control and counterfactual gates.

    This sourceSeminal characterization of the fundamental attribution error — the systematic over-weighting of dispositional over situational causes — supporting its framing as a miscalibration of the control and counterfactual gates (854).

Mechanisms

• Actor Role Map
  • The failure mode has a name in social psychology: the reflex to over-attribute outcomes to a focal person's character
• Belief-Desire-Knowledge Map
  • It is especially prone to the fundamental attribution error — filling the "desire" and "belief" columns with dispositional stories ("she just doesn't want change") while ignoring the situation the other agent is actually in

    This sourceDescribes observers' tendency to overattribute behavior to dispositions while underweighting situational constraints.

• Counter-Script Review
  • It is a working counter to the fundamental attribution error, the reflex to explain others' behavior by disposition ("oppositional")

    This sourceDefines the fundamental attribution error as overreading behavior as evidence of stable disposition while underweighting situational constraints.

• Scapegoat Risk Triage Checklist
  • This is the tool's guard against the fundamental attribution error,

    This sourceDefines the fundamental attribution error as over-attributing behavior to personal disposition while underweighting situational causes.

• Status-Preserving Attribution
  • It leans on the well-documented fundamental attribution error: observers over-attribute others' failures to disposition

    This sourceDocuments the fundamental attribution error as overemphasizing dispositional causes while underweighting situational influences.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065260108603573 ×1

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