Actor/Observer Bias Essay

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It is Human nature to create and validate impressions of people in our everyday lives. It is a fact that people will form an impression almost instantly just by looking at another person. These impressions will have a very strong hold on who you believe this person is even when it may or may not be false. This concept plays a huge role in our family, friend, and romantic relationships. Cognitive errors and biases effect the way we think about a person and how we behave or act around them also. Some examples of Errors or Biases would include: trait negativity bias, Self-fulfilling prophecy, and actor/observe effect. These are a few errors/biases that I have used in my person relationships. Trait negativity bias is when negative information carries more weight than positive information. Me and my siblings usually never got …show more content…

This bias refers to when a person overestimates internal causes and underestimate external causes for a person, so when one is the “observer”. On the other hand, when it comes to one’s self they tend to underestimate internal and overestimate external, so when they are the “actor”. A specific example from my experiences would be whenever me and my partner do something wrong. Whenever he forgets to do something that I have asked him to do like grab groceries or clean the apartment I always just assume internal reasoning like he is lazy and doesn’t do what I ask of him. In situations when I’m the one that doesn’t clean or forgets to do something that he had asked me to do I always have an external excuse like I was busy enough for me to forget or I had a situation where I wasn’t able to complete the task rather than looking internally like it is my fault. This error is one that everyone can relate to because we do this whether we are thinking that we are doing it or not in any relationship that we

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