Milgram’s notorious ‘obedence’ experiment.The investigators found that subjects rated an author’s attitude equally as positive or negative regardless of whether they were told that (1) the author had freely chosen to write positively/ negatively about Fidel Castro as when they were told that (2) the author had to write a positive/ negative article based on the result of a coin toss.however, we should avoid diminishing individual responsibility by over-emphasizing situational factors.an emphasis on situational factors is important as they are often more easily modifiable.

personality) and situational factors, and for any given behaviour both are likely to be at play (“interactionism”) we need to remember that actions are a result of both intrinsic factors (e.g.The FAE is useful for establishing a psychologically safe “no blame” culture that is important for healthcare systems to be able to detect and analyse errors consider using advocacy-inquiry to allow the learner to share why they think they did what did.ask yourself, ‘I wonder what situational factors contributed to that behaviour?’.This is important in simulation-based education and when given feedback in the real world.Culture - FAE may be more common in Western culture (individualism) than in Eastern collectivist culturesĮducators should always be wary of the FAE when assessing the performance of learners.Thus FAE is more likely to occur with increased cognitive load. Lack of effortful adjustment - FAE occurs even though we are aware that the person’s behavior is constrained by situational factors as it requires effort to simultaneous consider dispositional and situational factors.Salience of the actor - tendency to attribute an observed effect to potential causes that capture our attention, i.e.Just world phenomenon - the belief that people get what they deserve provides the security that if you are a good person then bad things won’t happen to you (Lerner and Miller, 1978).Blaming the victim of sexual assault because of the way she dressed or actedĮxplanations for why the FAE occurs include:.However, it may be that the person is late for the airport or has a labouring woman in the car Most people’s immediate reaction when someone cuts in front of them on the motorway is “what a jerk!”.“…explanation of the behavior of humans always requires reference to the situation the person is in” The FAE rarely applies to oneself – individuals often explain their (bad) behaviour on situational factors rather than an intrinsic character flaw. FAE is an example of attribution bias, the class of cognitive biases that result in systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviours (others are the ultimate attribution error, actor-observer bias, and hostile attribution bias).The FAE important because behaviour is often more determined by context rather a person’s particular characteristics.is also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect.The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the tendency for people to explain someone else’s behaviour on their personality or other intrinsic qualities in a given situation rather than considering the influence of the situational factors.

Actor observer bias define