Is the Fundamental Attribution Error Fundamental or Even An Error?

I thought the bulk of the case for the Fundamental Attribution Error was in how we make attributions for our own behavior vs. how we make attributions for others' behavior, NOT in "we never give enough credit to circumstances."

In your buffet/cable TV examples, I don't believe it matters whether you are asked to explain your own behavior, or someone else's. This is obviously not true for the Castro example.

People find that their own behavior is caused by both personal and circumstantial factors, but they believe that the behavior of others is much less dependent on circumstance.

The above commenter is right, and it's one of the most robust findings in psychology. It's also hugely relevant in real life. 99.9% of the time, people assume that other people do stuff because of stuff inside them, but when we do stuff it's because of external reasons. Don't dis the fundamental attribution error.

I am with Barbar in that I understood the concept to be most applicable when evaluating your outcomes as opposed to other peoples outcomes. If I fail it is because the circumstances were against me, but if I succeed it is because I am super-awesome. If you fail it is because you are an idiot, and if you succeed it is because circumstances were in your favor.
But from my experience with a lot of the organizational behavior literature, it felt that the a lot of the research and writing in the field was about taking a pretty easily explainable and plausible concept, slap on as fancy a label as the concept can handle, and twist it around as many ways as can be concieved until the article is published and eternal Org Behavior glory is attained.

In conjunction with Scott Clark's point, it's a little silly to call this phenomenon the "Fundamental Attribution Error," because there are a lot of related biases that are at least as important (and clicking through on the Wikipedia link I see that this is discussed there as well).

Well, lots of things that seem obvious or practical DON'T pan out. If you want to make fun of psychology, make fun of the completely made up stuff (Clinical and Personality psychology). The social and cognitive stuff are pretty good science.

Anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows how robust this thing is in real life. How often have we wished our partner blamed our circumstances rather than us when things go wrong. It's more complicated then just this simple statement - for example, when things are going wrong, or your more distant from the target, you start doing this more.

it's a little silly to call this phenomenon the "Fundamental Attribution Error," because there are a lot of related biases that are at least as important

"Fundamental Attribution Error" is a clever bit of academic marketing. A better name might be "Initial Attribution Bias", but then it wouldn't sound as interesting.

Perhaps the reason we focus on personal factors is that it is sometimes easier to change them on the margin through incentives.