ABSTRACT
One of the most fundamental mental activities of humans is to find causal structure in the activities and environment that surrounds them. To make sense of their social world, people need to relate various actions and events to the entities that cause them. An essential element in this causal analysis is discounting, or the weeding-out of less relevant conditions in favor of the most diagnostic or predictive causal factor. This selection serves cognitive economy, as it reduces the causes people need to attend to in order to predict and control their environment. Nevertheless, a plethora of studies have indicated that people can sometimes simplify their causal analysis too much, by completely ignoring some causal factors that are important. This pervasive
tendency is known as the fundamental attribution bias (Ross, 1977; see also Jones & Harris, 1967): People often conclude that a person who initiated an action was predisposed to do so, and yet a full causal analysis would suggest that situational pressures also contributed a great deal. It is generally believed that this bias is partly responsible for stereotyping and discrimination of individuals. One of the continuing interests in social psychology is that, counter to layman intuitions, experiments (e.g. Festinger, 1957; Milgram, 1963) often illustrate how much people's behavior depends on the strength of social situations rather than the actor's dispositions.
