"I can't believe that people would be so stupid as to build a house on the edge of a cliff like that; it's their own fault they are homeless now," Owen said as he looked at the news footage of the wrecked expensive homes at the bottom of the muddy hillside collapse. Owen's response illustrates an attributional pattern called:

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Owen's statement of blaming the victims for their own misfortune suggests the attributional pattern of blaming the victim, which implies that people make judgments about others' situations based on their own beliefs and assumptions without taking into account the larger social, economic, or environmental context. The self-serving bias involves attributing one's successes to internal, dispositional factors and failures to external, situational factors. The fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to overemphasize dispositional explanations and underestimate situational causes when explaining other people's behavior. Hindsight bias involves overestimating one's ability to have predicted an event after it has occurred.

"I Can't Believe That People Would Be So Stupid as to Build