A cognitive twist, not shaken or stirred

Recently, in my psychology class, we've been talking about errors in thinking that we all have. Such biases such as the Fundamental Attribution Error or Actor-Observer bias. And these are things we all do. It's wild. And if you try to catch yourself thinking this way...it really blows your mind.

Fundamental attribution error – this is the tendency for people to underestimate situational influences for others behaviour and over estimate personal or internal factors in persons behaviour. We often neglect situations and just look at personality as an explanation. For example...a person you meet at a party acts distant. You assume that the person is either not friendly or is arrogant. What you don't know is that the person just found out that her grandmother died and yet she didn't want to bow out of the party at the last minute. So you attribute how she acts to 'who she is'...whereas it's really about the situation that she's been put in.

Actor-observer bias - this is the tendency to attribute your own behavior to the situation but others person’s behavior to person (internal) causes. We all do this quite regularly. I walk to work on a busy road. Quite often I have to side-step another person coming at me, which causes me to somewhat cut off the person next to me. It's something that I wouldn't normally do, but because of the situation, I have to do it. But sometimes as I'm walking on that same sidewalk, I get cut off...and I get angry at the person for doing it to me. I think, "How rude!". But maybe they were about to be run over by the person heading toward them and had to do what I did just a few minutes earlier. But I attribute their movement to just 'rudeness'.

Then my fav error, that I see in England (and the States) constantly....primarily because my hubby and I are sports fans and players. This one is the self-serving bias...tendency to take credit for our successes (internal for doing well), but we deny responsibility for what we do poorly (external attributes). When my team wins (teams I play for or teams I'm rooting for), it's all about how awesome we were. But when we lose...well it had to be the umpire, or we had injuries, or the conditions just weren't fair.

How many of you will catch your cognitive errors today? I know I've already seen a few in my day...