People systematically ignore situational constraints and infer personal opinion from assigned essays

Evidence

Now when you get an essay built around an assigned point of view, written as part of an exam in which students are trying to show how forcefully they can argue for anything, what can you say about the student’s personal opinion on the issue? Zilch. So if you are asked what the essay writer really believed, you would have to say 0, right? But people often do not say 0. Instead they ignore the situational constraints on the essay writer, which in this case were very powerful, and say the essay reveals something about the writer’s personal feelings. They thus make the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Fundamental Attribution Error as ignoring situational constraints when inferring personal disposition.