Any diary on understanding people today is going to be about
you know what. So be warned.
A lot of recent research strongly suggests that human beings form very quick judgments because we use rules of thumb or what are sometimes more formally called heuristics. Human beings are creatures of action, and we've evolved to make 'quick and dirty' decisions. While this idea is still controversial in some areas of academia, it has also won a Nobel Prize for Daniel Kahneman, one of its main originators.
Kahneman integrated his work on heuristics and biases into economics, which sorely needed an account of how human beings actually make decisions. It is was needed because in many contexts we are very proned to make bad judgments using those very useful heuristics.
It can be a real shock to find out that we are not all that rational.
So how about errors in understanding other people? Many, many of us are inclined to make what is called the fundamental attribution error. Roughly, that means taking someone's action as showing a deep personality trait. For example, suppose I am stopped by unforeseeable traffic accident and arrive 30 minutes late to an important meeting. All the people who decide that my arriving late was extremely thoughtless and self-absorbed are going in for the fallacious reasoning the error describes. (Believe me, in my profession that's just how people think. Then they write other people, saying how bad one is.)
I'm going to repeat below the first description of the error I found on the web this afternoon, but there's something we should add in. Another recent finding is that the opinions of people around one can affect the quality of one's behavior. If you manage to suggest to someone that their performance is not going to be good, their performance is highly likely to be degraded.
So here's the moral: if you decide that someone who posts a comment really is disgusting, you probably are committing a fallacy. HOWEVER, if you express that opinion, you'll be a partner to the production of pretty bad behavior.
AND as a frequent contributor to this site might say, THAT'S SCIENCE!!
Description of the error:
When we are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, we tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor. We then tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external situational factors.
This can be due to our focus on the person more than their situation, about which we may know very little. We also know little about how they are interpreting the situation.
Western culture exacerbates this error, as we emphasize individual freedom and autonomy and are socialized to prefer dispositional factors to situational ones.
When we are playing the role of observer, which is largely when we look at others, we make this fundamental attribution error. When we are thinking about ourselves, however, we will tend to make situational attributions.