Defensive attribution hypothesis
The tendency to assign blame in ways that protect us from feeling we could suffer, or cause, the same harm. We blame the person responsible more as the outcome gets more severe, and we blame a victim less when they seem similar to us.
In everyday life
When a house burns down from a forgotten candle, a person who often lights candles calls it bad luck, while someone who never does calls the owner careless.
When a neighbor's small kitchen fire is put out quickly, you call it an accident, but when an identical mistake burns down a whole building, you insist the person must have been reckless.
Why your mind does this
To act at all, we need some belief that our choices matter and that we can pull them off. A bit of extra confidence gets us moving, keeps us going after setbacks, and protects our sense of self-worth and our standing in a group.
Its family, in 30 seconds: Confidence to act
How to spot it
Notice when your blame grows with how bad the outcome was, even though the actions were the same.
How to counter it
Judge a choice by what the person knew at the time, then note separately how bad the result turned out.
Same family: Confidence to act
- Overconfidence effect
- Social desirability bias
- Third-person effect
- False consensus effect
- Hard-easy effect
- Lake Wobegon effect
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Egocentric bias
- Optimism bias
- Forer effect
- Barnum effect
- Self-serving bias
- Actor-observer bias
- Illusion of control
- Illusory superiority
- Fundamental attribution error
- Defensive attribution hypothesis
- Trait ascription bias
- Effort justification
- Risk compensation
- Peltzman effect
SourcesShaver (1970)·Wikipedia