My experiences do demonstrate the Fundamental Attribution Error. FAE is explaining our behaviors because of the situations we are going through, but explaining someone else’s behaviors because that is his or her personality. (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2013). One attribution is that my boyfriend was acting foolish. The second attribution was that the employee at Target is a rude person. Both attributions had to do with each persons personalities and not what situation they were in. On the contrary, the situational causes were different.
When my boyfriend yelled at me, I felt slightly different than when the employee at Target gave me an attitude. When my boyfriend yelled at me, I was very confused and also very angry. I was confused because
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Being aware of the FAE makes me think twice before getting angry or surprised at someone when they do something distressing. For example, before calling the driver who cut me off offensive names, I might think to myself “maybe he is late to catch his flight to see his family”. I do think that other people commit the FAE when judging my own behavior. I work in retail and do not always get to go on break or go home on time, so there was a time when I was very frustrated and took it out on a customer. That customer called me unpleasant names but most likely did not realize that I was supposed to go on my break or leave work a long time before I rang her out. When responding to people with mental illness, the FAE might affect how other people respond to those individuals. For example, many people know only the myths and stereotypes about anxiety but not the actual facts. Since mental illness cannot be physically seen he or she may think that nothing is wrong and someone with social anxiety just does not want to go out. He or she may think someone with generalized anxiety is only pretending that they are always worried for attention. The FAE will also affect how we think about criminals. People may say, “They have to steal because they are too lazy to work for their money” or something along those lines. The FAE affects many things that we say or think of on a daily basis about many different