In Samet's 1975 study, 31 of 37 officers blamed their own skill rather than the rating scale for evaluation errors that the study's own data traced to the scale

intelligence-tradecraftsource-evaluationadmiralty-codecognitive-biasself-attributionepistemics

Asked where the fault lay when the Admiralty Code's reliability and accuracy scales produced inconsistent ratings, the officers in Samet's 1975 study overwhelmingly pointed at themselves. Thirty-one of thirty-seven attributed the problem to the "inability of intelligence officers to correctly assess and interpret the ratings"; only six blamed the "inadequacy of the scales themselves." The self-assessment ran directly against the study's own statistics, which — showing three-fourths of them unable to hold the two axes apart and prompting Samet's call for finer scales — located the deeper problem in the instrument, not the user.

The result is a self-attribution bias sitting inside a paper about rating-scale design: users of a structurally coarse tool diagnosing a tool failure as a personal failure. It is a distinct finding from the non-independence result — that one is about how the axes were used, this one about whom the users held responsible — and it is the kind of human observation that rarely survives into the secondary literature. Kelly et al. (2025) cite Samet for the non-independence finding; the self-blame result appears not to have carried forward, which is part of why the primary was worth reading.