Ultimate Attribution Error
We attribute positive acts of out-group members to luck and negative acts to their character.
The ultimate attribution error is a type of attribution error which describes how attributions of causality are affected by the groups to which people belong. In-group members' positive behaviors are attributed to character; negative behaviors to circumstance. For out-group members, the attribution is reversed. This perpetuates prejudice by making disconfirming evidence (an out-group member doing something good) seem like an exception.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Politics Sports Rivalry Fans of Team A attribute their rival's recent charitable donation to 'PR strategy' while they would attribute the same action by their own team to genuine goodwill.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
When an out-group member succeeds, it is attributed to favorable circumstances, but when an in-group member succeeds at the same task, it is seen as evidence of inherent talent.
Your colleague from the rival team delivered an excellent presentation. You think they must have gotten lucky with the data they were given. Later, they made a small error in an email, and you conclude they're just not very detail-oriented.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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