Target Article: "The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research"

Abstract We review the classic studies on social influence and the fundamental attribution error to determine (a) whether it is true that behavior of the sort observed in those studies is externally caused in the two senses of external causality used by attribution theorists, (b) whether laypeople have been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, and (c) whether there is a better way to characterize the errors people make. We conclude that (a) behavior in those studies has not been shown to be externally caused in the two senses used by attribution theorists, (b) people have not been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, (c) there is a different sense of internal versus external causality that better characterizes the errors people make, and (d) these literatures taken together suggest that Americans are far more disposed to preserve face and avoid embarrassment than most people had suspected.