Attribution Bias Quotes

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.

Happy is he who can trace effects to their causes.

I don't want to be one of those bosses... taking credit for phenomena that are out of my control.

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.

We are all disposed to attribute to other's motives and views that we have entertained ourselves.

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance.

Women attribute their success to working hard, luck, and help from other people. Men will attribute that - whatever success they have, that same success - to their own core skills.

In this business, a lot of coaches are running around thinking they're the reason their teams are winning.

Once you're a winner, you can give all sorts of reasons why you're a winner. Of course, you could all those same reasons to explain why a show fails.

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge.

The only reason people are saying I'm the number-one player is because I'm with the number-one team.

Attribution is as much an art as a science.

Attribution is power.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

I think the greatest imagination we can exercise is one that imagines how someone else feels. Because you know how you feel, but so often we attribute our own feelings on to someone else.

Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.