Harry Potter and the Fundamental Attribution Error

“You saved them from You-Know-Who,” McGonagall said. “How should they not care?”

Harry looked up at McGonagall and sighed. “I suppose there’s no chance that if I said fundamental attribution error you’d have any idea what that meant.”

McGonagall shook her head. “No, but please explain.”

“Well...” Harry said, trying to figure out how to describe that particular bit of Muggle science. “Suppose you come into work and see your coworker kicking his desk. You think, ‘what an angry person he must be’. Your coworker is thinking about how someone pushed him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behavior, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behavior. People’s stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don’t see people’s histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don’t see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context.” There were some elegant experiments which confirmed this, but Harry wasn’t about to go into them.

McGonagall’s eyebrows drew up. “I think I understand...” she said slowly. “But what does that have to do with you?”

Harry kicked the brick wall of the byway, hard enough to make his foot hurt. “People think that I saved them from You-Know-Who because I’m some kind of great warrior of the Light.”

“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord...” murmured McGonagall, an irony leavening her voice which Harry did not then understand

“Yes,” Harry said, annoyance and frustration warring in his voice, “like I destroyed the Dark Lord because I have some kind of permanent, enduring destroy-the-Dark-Lord trait. I was fifteen months old at the time! I don’t know what happened, but I would guess it had something to do with, as the saying goes, contingent environmental circumstances. And certainly nothing to do with my personality. People don’t care about me, they aren’t even paying attention to me, they want to shake hands with a bad explanation.”

Rational Potter explains to McConagall that people are projecting onto him powers he does not have.