The group attribution error is a group-serving, attributional bias identical to the fundamental attribution error except that it occurs between different groups rather than different individuals.
Group members are more likely to attribute the decisions of their own group to its decision rules, while they tend to attribute the decisions of another group to its members' attitude.
The group attribution error was first reported by Scott Allison and David Messick.
Compare to the outgroup homogeneity bias.
Famous quotes containing the words group, attribution and/or error:
“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)
“They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the “discoverability” is the only error here.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)