We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others. The actor-observer bias attempts to explain the long studied idea that people understand their own actions differently than the way an observer might view the situations and make inferences about it (Nisbett 1973 Malle 2006). This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. What Tufekci describes is not the FAE at all, but what social psychologists call the actor-observer asymmetry (AKA actor-observer bias).There are two main accounts of this latter phenomenon. Observer bias is particularly likely to occur in observational studies. Observer bias is also called detection bias. It often affects studies where observers are aware of the research aims and hypotheses. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. Observer bias happens when a researcher’s expectations, opinions, or prejudices influence what they perceive or record in a study. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. As actors of behavior, we have more information available to. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error. The actor-observer bias is the phenomenon of attributing other people’s behavior to internal factors (fundamental attribution error) while attributing our own behavior to situational forces (Jones & Nisbett, 1971 Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973 Choi & Nisbett, 1998). We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. (Oh, ye of little faith!) Instead, they might think that the FAE is something like the following: Now, some readers may object that what I have described is not what the FAE means and that I don’t know what I am talking about.
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