Understanding human biases and overcoming them.
Consider the set of all the things that happen to you. A lot of them you have no control over. You didn’t choose to be born. Some you have full control over. You chose to read this article. And then there are others you have partial control over. You can be good to someone in …
We don’t take things personally. It just happens. I mean, we have little conscious control over it when it happens. Like many other thoughts and emotions, we can only deal with this psychological phenomenon post hoc. We can only manage it after it has happened. Why does it happen, though? We take things personally because …
When things go wrong in your life, do you find yourself thinking: “Everything is my fault.”“I always mess everything up.” If you do, chances are you’re over-blaming yourself. Over-blaming or taking more than your fair share of responsibility for things can be just as bad as under-blaming. Things go wrong every once in a while …
“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, ‘What else could this mean?’” – Shannon Alder The actor-observer bias occurs when people attribute their own behaviors to external causes and the behaviors of others to internal causes. External causes include situational factors that one has no …