Errors in Perception

Do you fairly judge on your behavior? What about others’? People tend to be generous about them while they use stricter standard to the others. This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.  People are likely to overestimate internal attribution of others. For example, if someone cuts in front of you in line, your immediate reaction is, "This person is a complete jerk!" (Sherman, 2014.) When explaining other people’s negative behaviors, we are biased and link those behaviors to negative personalities. While people regard others’ bad behaviors as bad nature or lacking manners, they also underestimate external attributions. It could be an emergency situation; maybe he got a call that his wife is about to give a birth. We often do not acknowledge the external excuses of others.

Interesting fact that social psychologists have found is we rarely make the fundamental attribution error to ourselves. We find a way out by finding other excuses instead. For instance, when we do not do well on the test, we usually blame the test, “the questions were tricky and confusing”, or the professor, “She doesn’t know how to teach”. This concept is called Errors of Self-serving bias where individuals attribute positive dealings to their own character and negative dealings to external factors (Wengrzyn) . We are nice to ourselves and, instead of blaming ourselves for not studying enough, find many other excused that caused bad result.

Fundamental Attribution Error sometimes makes us to take thing personally. This describes the everyday experience of encountering people who don’t treat you just right, as the royalty you implicitly believe you are. (Sherman, 2014) Maybe it was just a bad day for him when he ignored your “Good Morning.” You don’t have to relate that bad feeling to his disrespectful personality. As Sherman said, most people are good and decent, subject to the same difficulties in life as you are. Therefore reacting too sensitively to these kinds of situations won’t be helpful to both your mental health and relationships you have. Instead of seeing others with strict standards, give them a break and excuse as much as you give to yourself. Probably being aware of fundamental attribution error will improve a trust in relationships and make higher quality communication.

It is also important to recognize that we are nice to ourselves and deny our own faults. Self-serving bias is happened to protect our ego because it is easy to just blame other factors instead of looking back what we have done wrong. However, this attitude is not helpful when we need to improve and learn. Because we don’t judge ourselves objectively, we loose a chance to grow up from our mistakes. Though it is hard to face our fault and admit it, the best way to not repeat that mistake is taking time for self-reflection. According to the Huffington Post Article, Self-Serving Bias: Why Some Leaders Don't Learn From Their Mistakes, from a motivational perspective, the best way to handle a failure is to look honestly at how your own actions contributed to the outcome, emphasizing what you can change so that your performance improves from now on.
 When I look back my middle school and high school report card seasons after the exam week, I always had self-serving biased for the subject I didn’t do well. When my mom asked why I didn’t do well on it, I told her that the teacher was so mean and gave us tricky questions, or it was generally hard test that most of my classmate didn’t do well. Then my mom would ask, “so nobody got an A on this test?” Of course then I would use the fundamental attribution error to explain that, “Well… Very few got an A… But that was just because they were lucky! They just guessed the answer and got it right!!” It is always hard to give a credit for someone who did better than me because I get so jealous. However from this class I learned it wasn’t only me how was generous to myself and strict to others. Though it is tough criticize ourselves and clap on others successes, trying to see others and ourselves with objective views will help us to improve ourselves and build stronger relationships.