Causal Attribution
Psychological Biases
đź”— Causal Attribution
14 biases in this category
Biases that distort how we explain the causes of events and behaviors.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to overemphasize personality-based explanations for others' behavior while underemphasizing situational influences—and to do the reverse for our own behavior.
Actor-Observer Bias
The tendency to attribute our own actions to external factors while attributing others' actions to internal characteristics—a variant of the fundamental attribution error.
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to attribute positive events to one's own character but attribute negative events to external factors, protecting self-esteem and self-concept.
Group Attribution Error
The tendency to believe that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, or that a group's decision outcome reflects the preferences of all group members.
Ultimate Attribution Error
The tendency to make internal attributions for an outgroup's negative behaviors and external attributions for their positive behaviors, while doing the reverse for one's own group.
Just-World Hypothesis
The cognitive bias that the world is fundamentally just—people get what they deserve and deserve what they get—leading to victim-blaming and belief that good behavior will be rewarded.
Defensive Attribution
The tendency to attribute more blame to a victim as the severity of consequences increases, especially when the observer can imagine themselves in a similar situation—we blame victims more when outcomes are worse to reassure ourselves it couldn't happen to us.
Outcome Bias
The tendency to judge a decision by its outcome rather than by the quality of the decision at the time it was made, conflating outcome luck with decision quality.
Moral Luck
The phenomenon where moral judgments are influenced by factors beyond an individual's control—the same action is judged differently based on outcomes that were largely a matter of luck.
Post Hoc Fallacy
The logical fallacy of assuming that because event B followed event A, A must have caused B—"after this, therefore because of this.
Regression Fallacy
Mistaking regression to the mean—the statistical tendency for extreme values to be followed by less extreme values—for causation.
Illusion of Control
The tendency to believe that we have control over outcomes that are actually determined by chance, overestimating the role of skill versus luck.
Hindsight Bias
The tendency, after an event has occurred, to see it as having been predictable, even if there was little or no objective basis for predicting it—"I knew it all along.
Curse of Knowledge (Attribution)
The difficulty of imagining what it was like not to know something once you know it, leading to overestimation of how obvious or predictable outcomes were.