Underattribute

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To attribute insufficiently or inadequately.; To underestimate the role of some specified factors in causing (a particular outcome, action, or state of affairs). transitive

    "Our tendency to overattribute behavior to dispositions and underattribute it to circumstances is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977)."

  2. 2
    To attribute insufficiently or inadequately.; To tend to mistakenly believe that (a certain quality) is not present when, in fact, it is. transitive

    "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. ""

  3. 3
    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. transitive

    "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."

Example

More examples

"Our tendency to overattribute behavior to dispositions and underattribute it to circumstances is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977)."

Etymology

From under- + attribute.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.