The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process

Ross · Measurement & Method · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · 1977 · Paywalled

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.

Ross, L. (1977) 'The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process', Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, pp. 173–220.

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