@dgcooley - thanks.  Great explanation!

Lin - You're mostly right. 

The Fundamental Attribution Error involves people deciding things are not really their fault, or are a result of their circumstances and therefore don't really count against them. ("I lost my temper because I slept horribly last night and my dog is sick and I locked my keys in the car this morning. You lost your temper because you're a hothead with no self-control.")

Thus, the Reverse Fundamental Attribution Error involves people blaming themselves for things that aren't their fault at all. 

We see this over and over in usability studies, where the participant fails to complete a task and says something like, "Well, it's my fault. I should have known to look for knives under 'chef supplies' instead of 'kitchen utensils.'"

In fact, it's of course perfectly reasonable to think of a knife as a kitchen utensil. The study participant didn't do anything wrong. It's the fault of the Web designer (or Information Architect, or whatever decision maker didn't listen to their experts) who made the bad decision to create two vague categories with so much potential overlap. 

The real problem arises when stakeholders use this to justify keeping bad design features in place. "Sure, she couldn't find the knife, but she admitted herself that it's her own fault! We don't need to reorganize the content or change the category labels." Well, OK, but having people sitting around blaming themselves for not being able to find a knife on your e-commerce site won't help you sell knives. 

Even worse is skipping the research entirely so you're just left wondering why on earth you aren't selling any knives. 

Make sense?

@David - there seems to be some confusion as to what you mean by "reverse fundamental attribution error."  Could you help us understand what you meant?

Also, the link you provided to Hawthorne Effect doesn't really support the Hawthorne Effect -- the last para "Later research into the Hawthorne effect has suggested that the original results may have been overstated. In 2009, researchers at the University of Chicago reanalyzed the original data and found that other factors also played a role in productivity and that the effect originally described was weak at best." 

I would personally lend a lot of credence to the Hawthorne Effect - mostly because it seems to be the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle appled to social research.

@lin @Bolingbroke I did a quick (read superficial) search online and could only find the error under the name "The Fundamental Attribution Error" without "Reverse" on this page, which provides faculty with an exercise, it is described as:The fundamental attribution error is the tendency of observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of a situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition....

We tend to attribute causation to the focus of our attention, which is different when we are observing than when we are acting. When another person acts, our focus is on that person, who thus seems to cause whatever happens. When we act, however, the environment commands our attention and thus seems to explain our behavior.

Now the reverse of these is that one does see him/herself as full in control and so to blame for whatever isn't working. So I take it that this amounts to something like a type of extension of "I can do anything if only I put my mind to it," (As M Scott Peck said about understanding the mechanics of a car) and the corollary of that would be, "it is up to me to get anything to work right." But human tendency really is not to say "I must be doing it wrong." As I  always hear from someone who does tech support, when people ask for help, they assume the program is faulty when really they just don't know how to use it -- or even a computer for that matter. 

@Ariela - reverse fundamental attribution errors are new to me. That lst one could do with a shorter name, like "it's never my fault" or "mistakes were made, but not by me."  

It seems to me what David is labeling "reverse fundamental attribution errors" are very different from "it's never my fault."  From my read of David's article, it seems that "reverse fundamental attribution errors" are more like the subject attempts to make the command work, or makes additional attempts to inspire the website come up --  because the user assumes that they (the user) are doing something wrong.  This extra effort on the part of the subject would then perturb the results, if the experiment was trying to determine whether or not the website was functional or user-friendly. 

David, an eye opener article, for me particularly since I once worked for a social science research outfit. What I found especially of interest was your mention of "reverse fundamental attribution errors" ( admittedly a very cool sounding phrase and something to remember when the conversation flags around the dinner table ) and any theory as to why respondents reacted unexpectedly and shouldered the blame when confronted with an ill-designed web site. Have websites become the this age's upmost authority symbol?

This was very interesting as it's something I hadn't really considered before. I realize we all have biases about all sorts of different things--and why would research be any different! Thanks for opening my eyes to this. I'd imagine awareness is one way we can prevent our biases from damaging the results.

@David Thanks for a great post on what biases could be at work. The names Hawthorne effect and reverse fundamental attribution errors are new to me. That lst one could do with a shorter name, like "it's never my fault" or "mistakes were made, but not by me."