Fundamental attribution error

[5] Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

Jones wrote that he found Ross's phrase "overly provocative and somewhat misleading", and also joked: "Furthermore, I'm angry that I didn't think of it first.

[6] Other psychologists have argued that the fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias are related but independent phenomena, with the former being a common explanation for the latter.

Subjects were sensitive to even very small correlations, and their confidence in the association tracked how far they were discrepant (i.e., if they knew when they did not know), and was higher for the strongest relations.

Subjects also showed awareness of the effect of aggregation over occasions and used reasonable strategies to arrive at decisions.

Epstein concluded that "Far from being inveterate trait believers, as has been previously suggested, [subjects'] intuitions paralleled psychometric principles in several important respects when assessing relations between real-life behaviors.

In this argument, the authors posed that the degree to which behaviour is constrained by a situation is a vital determinant of whether or not a dispositional attribution will be made.

[44][45] With such distinct definitions between the two, some cross-cultural studies also found that cultural differences of correspondence bias are not equivalent to those of fundamental attribution error.