You blame a stranger's bad driving on their character, but your own on traffic
People tend to explain other people's behaviour by their personality, 'they're rude,' while explaining their own identical behaviour by the situation, 'I was late.' Psychologist Lee Ross named the pattern in 1977 after reviewing experiments where observers consistently underweighted situational pressures on others. The bias runs in both directions: we're also quicker to credit our own successes to skill than other people's.