Attribution Processes

The other day, I overheard a younger high school student talking with some of his peers on the bus. He was telling them about how he had received a failing grade on an assignment, and then got into a fight with the teacher about it. The teacher had said what he had done wrong, but the student told his friends that the reason he failed was because the teacher "didn't know what she was doing". This is a perfect example of the self-serving bias, because the student attributed external factors to his failure on the assignment. However, as an observer, I formed an opinion that it was probably due to some fault on the student's part that he received the failing grade, even though I didn't even know him. This is known as the fundamental attribution error. I didn't even know this person, but I had already formed an opinion about the situation, and determined that he was at fault.