Question

As you are helping your newlywed friends move into their new home, you hear them arguing as they try to edge the king-sized bed frame through the bedroom doorway. The frame gets jammed and you automatically attribute the jam to the couple "being poor communicators" rather than attributing the failure to get the frame through the doorway to the possibility that it might be too big for the doorway. This is an example of:__________

Answer 1

Answer:

The correct answer is "The fundamental attribution error".

Explanation:

The fundamental attribution error is the human tendency to emphasize personal characteristics instead of analyzing the contextual or situational explanation for other people's behavior.

For example, when someone fails a test, the other students may think that their classmate failed because he is lazy or he didn't study enough and not because the questions of the test were wrongly formulated.

In this particular case, the first attribution that one does to the jam is that the couple did it because they are bad communicators, only because they were arguing moments before, rather than attributing the failure to get the frame to through the doorway to the possibility that it might be too big for the doorway.

In conclusion, this is an example of the fundamental attribution error.