Understanding why people do what they do can be challenging. One might choose to focus on the person and how certain traits and character differences affect the way they behave, like thinking someone is rude if they remove clothes from a dryer in use. Or, on the flip side, they can concentrate on the role of situational factors—based on the social circumstances at hand. Perhaps, he’s oblivious and just in a hurry to meet a new date. These attributes—either to the person’s disposition or to their social situation—form the basis of the attribution theory—that individuals often explain another’s behavior by crediting one or the other. Given a different situation, that so-called disrespectful guy is actually very polite. This example illustrates the power that situational factors have over judgments of personality.