fundamental-attribution-error

fundamental-attribution-error is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 125 tokens per session (1,937 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to the fundamental attribution error: blaming another person's character while overlooking the situation that shaped their behavior. It also considers why people explain their own actions differently.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it in performance reviews, customer-churn analysis, post-mortems, conflict resolution, and investigations of unexpected behavior.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unfair conclusions about employees, customers, teammates, or competitors when circumstances may better explain what happened.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it in performance reviews, customer-churn analysis, post-mortems, conflict resolution, and investigations of unexpected behavior.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill fundamental-attribution-error
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for fundamental-attribution-error

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for fundamental-attribution-error

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/fundamental-attribution-error.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,937 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00125 $0.01937
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00968
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00387
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00194

Measured 5d ago against content hash 0d517db6513e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

fundamental-attribution-error scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

fundamental-attribution-error/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Overview

The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the systematic tendency to over-weight character factors and under-weight situational factors when explaining others' behavior — while reversing this for your own behavior (actor-observer asymmetry). Coined by Lee Ross (1977), grounded in Jones & Harris's 1967 Castro study. The bias is automatic (System 1); situational correction requires deliberate effort (System 2).

Composes with hanlons-razor, survivorship-bias, critical-thinking, dual-system-thinking, narrative-fallacy.

When to Use

  • Diagnosing why an employee is underperforming
  • Analyzing customer churn
  • Conducting post-mortems on outages, accidents, or failures
  • Mediating interpersonal conflict
  • Designing products and observing user behavior
  • Performance reviews, evaluations, competitor behavior analysis
  • Someone says "fundamental attribution error," "actor-observer," or "what situation made this rational"

Not when: behavior shows a documented pattern across many distinct situations; situational framing is being used to avoid accountability.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a specific judgment to test for FAE → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. One-line: before concluding someone behaved a certain way because of who they are, ask what situation would make the behavior rational — that's the FAE counter-move.
  2. Check fit: if the same person behaves the same way across many distinct situations, dispositional inference is stronger. Single-situation explanations are FAE-prone.
  3. Elicit the specific judgment. Who's the person? What's the behavior? What explanation is being offered?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. One question at a time: is the explanation dispositional? What's the situational alternative? If I were in that situation, would I have behaved differently?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close: balanced analysis with both dispositional and situational factors + which is doing the explanatory work.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 123 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A 0d517db6513e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

fundamental-attribution-error is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 1,937 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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