The Field Guide › Paper
The paper that named the fundamental attribution error: the systematic tendency to overweight dispositional explanations (character, intent, ability) and underweight situational ones (context, constraint, system) when explaining others' behaviour. Ross showed this bias is not occasional but structural — the default of the intuitive psychologist. For PS and HOP, the implication is direct: blame is not just culturally convenient but cognitively automatic. Understanding why someone stayed silent, made an error, or failed to speak up requires deliberately overriding a near-universal attributional bias. One of the most cited papers in social psychology.