The bias we all experience is real and a real danger in some situations. Testing a theory and the final result might just turn out to be bogus. What I believe now, may be what the test results show unfortuntatly if one doesn't look at how testing bias can ruin any experiment.

Our tendency to stick with the views of the group, right or wrong not only get us into trouble with the 'other group' in real life, but lead to errors in judgment in business and personal life as well.

HA! Love the confirmation bias quote. I'm totally using that (with credit, of course) in my next workshop.

As for the people blaming themselves for not being able to find stuff, it isn't just employees of a single company. I've seen it happen in hundreds of usability studies across several industries, where representative users are employees, customers, or prospective customers. Participants are young, old, male, female, Ph.D.s, high school dropouts, tradespeople, retirees, stockbrokers, chemists, teachers, dentists, crafters, mechanics - you name it.

The most recent reference I found in my own records was in a usability study for a hospital system's web site. IIRC, that study had 5 female and 3 male participants.

It is an interesting question, though, and you can bet I'll be keeping much closer records (and asking my colleagues to do the same) from here on out. 

dgcooley, I'm curious, how many of your employees are women? I haven't made a rigorous study of it, of course, but in my experience men are more likely to blame an outside force -- the program if they can't get it to work, the teacher if they can't learn it, etc. -- while women are more likely to blame themselves.

Of course, that could just be confirmation bias on my part -- or, as I saw on Twitter today, "Everywhere I look, I see people falling prey to confirmation bias. Just as I suspected."

@Alison absolutely. If I had not already been used to other sites, like this one, I probably would not have figured out what was blocking the comments from being posted. So, yes, a newcomer may have just left and figured the site was broken.

Well done on figuring out the flaw. I wonder how many visitors left the site without figuring it out -- and of those, how many will not come back; how many will come back and not try to comment again, etc. They say you only have one time to make a first impression. The same is true for websites, too.

@Alison true, and that also pertains to biases about how things should work. For example,  a few weeks ago I found that any time I tried to comment on a blog post on a new board, it wouldn't go through unless there was already a comment there. I  tested it out and found that the problems persisted. I spoke with another user who encountered the same problem. 

 Then I figured out the cause of the problem. No comment goes up without an identified subject. When one puts in a comment after another, the system automatically copies the subject placed by the  previous comment. However, when no one has commented, no subject appears. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the subject line clearly showed as blank. Due to the design, it faded into the background, so that it didn't look like anything required was missing.

While I did figure out how to make it work, the design is still flawed because it does not make it obvious that there is a blank subject line that must be filled in before a comment posts.  

If you know your biases, then you can counter them, I'd imagine. Or balance them better. Awareness must be one of the best tools against flawed results.

@dgcooley I didn't mean that they think everything is working as it should but that they try something and can't get it to work and are not shown how they have to do it. For example, if you try to get something that is color to print in black and white but can't find a setting for that and no one shows you that there is a way, you are aware of a problem but don't blame yourself. In contrast, if your friend shows you that you have to get into the print dialog box to put in your preferences, then you may say, "Ah, so that's what you're supposed to do." In that case, you may well chalk up your failure to figure it out to your own lack of understanding. Whether or not one's ignorance of the usual configuration for computers here is to blame for the failure to get it to achieve the desired action is open to interpretation. I wouldn't consider it a clear case of bias.  

It's true that if the user never realizes there is a problem, that user won't blame themselves for the problem. They won't blame anyone, because they don't think anything is wrong. 

@dgcooley

What you refer to  sounds rather like being shown the solution to a puzzle and then kicking yourself for not having figured it out on your own. If something is set up in a counter-intuitive way, then most people really won't get it. But if they feel they should have, they may feel they were not on top of their game. That would be rather like having guessed wrong about whodunit in a mystery.  Though we may have thought Agatha Christie was not playing by the rules in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, we still would have felt smarter if we had figured it out. 

To refer to your own example, though, what happens if no one shows them the right place to look? If they don't get there on their own, and no one shows them the answer key, so to speak, so that they don't arrive at the results they want, aren't they more likely to say that the design is a poor one? 

What may at work in the situation in which people who have difficulty with a program or design blame themselves may be analogous to a layperson tasting wine. Imagine that his task is to rank the wines in order of quality with no price tags on him. He'd put whatever tastes best to him first. Imagine  then that he is told by a wine expert that what was ranked lowest sells for $500 a bottle and what took the layperson's first place sells for just $7 a bottle. Mr. Joe Average there will feel that he was wrong to follow his own tastes because the wine expert obviously knows more about wine than he does. But if he disdains the $500 wine, and no one points out the price tag, he would not likely rethink his position.  The people testing may also feel that the designers know more about how sites and programs "should" work than they do. 

There are many examples of bad design, but I'm not certain that we can infer that they are the product of the reverse fundamental attribution error. For example, I haven't heard anyone suggest that it was the root cause of  the glaring flaws in Apple's map. And I don't think even the biggest Apple fan claims that the users were doing it wrong, but Apple was still perfect.

And not everything that gets past QA actually does what it is supposed to do when you consider all aspects (not just how intuitive the design is).That doesn't prove this particular bias at work.  I would think it far more  likely that the product in question wasn't tested as much as it should have been rather than the fact that the testers recognized that things didn't work but just blamed themselves. 

One example of a serious design flaw that had fatal consequences was the O rings used in the shuttle. Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that problem was a lack of resilience that resulted from the short-term exposure to freezing temperature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAi_9quzUY. This was something no one thought to test before the disaster. So it's not a matter of "I couldn't get it to work right, but that's a problem with me," but a matter of believing you've checked over everything that you consider a potential problem and skip something that turns out to be pretty crucial.