Read the passage given below to answer.
In our day-to day life, we assign certain causes or reasons to a person's behaviour. This process is called attribution. Broadly, causes of a person are attributed to internal and external factors. External factors are related to situation. With reference to success and failure, Weiner has classified causes into internal/external and stable/unstable factors. In general, people attribute success to internal factors such as their ability and hard work. However, failure is attributed to external factors such as task difficulty and bad luck. Ability/fate and hard-work/task-difficulty are considered as stable and unstable factors respectively. Stable factors refer to those causes that do not change with time. It has been observed that people have a tendency to give greater weightage to internal factors than external one. This phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error. This tendency is stronger in some cultures than in others. Research suggests that Indians tend to make more external attributions than Americans do.
Fundamental attribution error is known as a tendency to give greater weightage to :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → internal factors than external factors
In making attributions, there is a general tendency for people to give greater weightage to internal or dispositional factors than to external or situational factors. This is called the fundamental attribution error. If a person A hits B, observers are more likely to say that A is a hot-tempered person (internal) than that B behaved in a nasty way (external).
Option (1) external factors than internal factors — Incorrect. This reverses the tendency. Indians do make more external (situational) attributions than Americans, but that is a difference between cultures in the strength of the error, not the error itself.
Option (2) stable factors than unstable factors — Incorrect. Stable and unstable are Weiner’s other dimension: whether a cause changes with time. The fundamental attribution error is about inside versus outside the person, not about permanence.
Option (4) unstable factors than stable factors — Incorrect. This too uses the stable-unstable dimension, which is not the one on which the fundamental attribution error is defined.
Note: The fundamental attribution error was explained in the chapter ‘Attitude and Social Cognition’ of the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2022, and is not explained in the NCERT book (2025-26); the 2023-24 NCERT keeps only its name among the key terms.
NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “Attribution of Causality … In making attributions, there is an overall tendency for people to give greater weightage to internal or dispositional factors, than to external or situational factors. This is called the fundamental attribution error.…” |