Dictionary

underattribute en · VERB

Pronunciation

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Etymology

From under- + attribute.

Meanings

1. (transitive) To attribute insufficiently or inadequately. ▸ To underestimate the role of some specified factors in causing (a particular outcome, action, or state of affairs).
   • 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. 2013, SuEllen Hamkins, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry: Stories of Strength and Meaning, page 12:
   • 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. 2017, Petter Gottschalk, CEOs and White-Collar Crime: A Convenience Perspective, page 43:
   • Most of us tend to overattribute our successes to ourselves rather than to circumstances, and conversely to underattribute our failures to ourselves. 2015, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Donald Sull, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World:
   • Our tendency to overattribute behavior to dispositions and underattribute it to circumstances is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). 2000, Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, The Handbook of Conflict Resolution, page 240:
2. (transitive) To attribute insufficiently or inadequately. ▸ To tend to mistakenly believe that (a certain quality) is not present when, in fact, it is.
   • 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 . 2019, Michael J. Hannon, What's the Point of Knowledge?: A Function-first Epistemology, page 121:
   • 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). 2008, Usha Goswami, Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, page 160:
   • 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. " 1975, Richard B. Darlington, Ronald G. Nathan, Radicals and Squares, and Other Statistical Procedures for the Behavioral Sciences, page 212:
   • 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. 2013, Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds Of Minds:
3. (transitive) 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.
   • 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. 2016, Anne Laure Bandle, The Sale of Misattributed Artworks and Antiques at Auction, page 194:
   • Claims by sellers of underattributed artworks 2022, Martin Wilson, Art Law and the Business of Art, page 367:

Forms

Antonyms

overattribute · overattribute · overattribute

Deriveds

underattribution