# underattribute
## English
### Etymology

From under- +‎ attribute.

### Pronunciation

* Audio (US):(file)

### Verb

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

#### Usage notes

* While this verb is marked as transitive, because it always has an object, in some cases the object is implied rather than stated. For example, in the quote given above: "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." Hostility is the object of underattribute.

#### Derived terms

* underattribution