Verb
To attribute insufficiently or inadequately. To underestimate the role of some specified factors in causing (a particular outcome, action, or state of affairs).
Usage- Transitive
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Our tendency to overattribute behavior to dispositions and underattribute it to circumstances is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977).
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Because of this, particualr discernment is needed to determine whether the diagnosis is a useful narrative for understanding a person's experience, with care to neither over- nor underattribute symptoms to that diagnosis.
Most of us tend to overattribute our successes to ourselves rather than to circumstances, and conversely to underattribute our failures to ourselves.
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For example, CEOs have been shown to overattribute poor firm performance to uncontrollable or temporary conditions in the external environment and underattribute performance problems to the current corporate strategy.
To attribute insufficiently or inadequately. To tend to mistakenly believe that (a certain quality) is not present when, in fact, it is.
Usage- Transitive
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The hypothesis of interest was stated by Siegel as follows: "Women who have personal difficulty in handling aggressive impulses are more extreme than others in their judgments of hostility in film characters— some underattribute and others overattribute. "
Tasks that include non-living natural kinds (e.g., clouds and rivers) generally elicit more animalistic errors (e.g., Carey, 1985; Laurendeau & Pinard, 1962; Smeets, 1973; see Nass, 1956, for discussion of content effects); however, even with such items, preschoolers are no more likely to overattribute life than to underattribute it (Hatano et al., 1993; Smeets, 1973).
To underattribute minds —to disregard or discount or deny the experience, the suffering and joy, the thwarted ambitions and frustrated desires of a mind-having person or animal—would be a terrible sin.
A better interpretation is that the data points to our tendency to underattribute knowledge to agents who knowingly do something for which they merit no praise— and this can be given a pragmatic explanation .
To attribute insufficiently or inadequately. To misattribute a work of art by asserting that the artist is a less renowned one than it actually is.
Usage- Transitive
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In the event of a sleeper consignment, the auctioneer is often not fraudulently misrepresenting the property, as he generally has no intention to erroneously underattribute and undersell the lot.
Claims by sellers of underattributed artworks