People explain actions via inner dispositions rather than situational dynamics

Evidence

If Seth goes to the basement and sees his daughter with a nail and a piece of wood in one hand and a hammer in the other, he assumes— almost always accurately—that she is going to pound the nail into the wood. Psychology has a rich literature, including patterns of errors, on attribution causes to dispositions rather than to perception–action dynamics in settings and situations that can cause and shape behavior (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 426

Categorization

• XREF: This is the fundamental attribution error / correspondence bias literature (Ross, Jones & Harris); the nail-hammer example is a nice concrete instance of perception-action understanding. — connects to: Motives of action are linguistically interpreted needs, not unconscious impulses. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2682; People cling to self-interest vocabularies even when they contradict experienced motives; People and situations mutually influence each other rather than situations acting one-way on people — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 354