hostile attribution bias
a general tendency to ascribe harmful or otherwise adverse intent to the ambiguous behavior of others. For example, a child who insists that another child bumped into her on the school playground on purpose when the action in fact was accidental is demonstrating a hostile attribution bias, as is an employee who claims his name was deliberately left off the distribution list for a recent memo despite coworker assurances that the error was inadvertent. This cognitive distortion is associated with such phenomena as aggression, conduct disorders, narcissism, and externalization. [first described in 1979 by personality psychologist William Nasby, clinical psychologist Brian C. Hayden, and social psychologist Bella M. DePaulo]