The Fundamental Attribution Error

This means that we explain others’ behavior as due to internal causes, and this means that we explain our own behavior as due to external causes.

We do that every day without thinking about it, without noticing it. This has nothing to do with your intelligence, or your personality. Actually, intelligent people seem to go into this trap more often than others.

You go into this trap, even if you know it’s a trap: If a person behaves friendly, your conclusion is that this is a kind person. And if the person behaves the way you feel is problematic, your conclusion is that this is a difficult person. But you don´t think that you yourself can consciously behave as a difficult person or you can behave friendly no matter how you actually feel. Or can´t you?
Now you should be aware of that you interpret others’ behavior like your mind tells you it should be; a good man and a bad man.

Imagine a social event and you have to be there. You feel nervous, but everyone else looks like they are very relaxed. Your conclusion is that everyone else is relaxed; it’s just you who are nervous. But your nervousity is probably not visible, no one can see it, and all the other are thinking the same about you: what a relaxed man.

If someone runs into the ditch with his car you immediately think that the person must be a bad driver.
But if you run into the ditch, you have an explanation; it is because it was a bad road, ice, or there were other external circumstances that caused the accident. Maybe not every time but quite often. This is because we see things from different perspectives depending on who is acting:
when you are doing something yourself, you often see the surroundings, ice on the road etc., but when another person does something stupid, strange, whatever, you see that the person is causing what happens.

If we would see ourselves in a different way, we should understand that even we ourselves affect the things happening more than our experience tells us. But we all have a certain image, true or not, about ourselves and the image is controlling our own experiences. If there are changes in the environment, we don´t see them.

We now feel that a person who behaves friendly is friendly and for example, the vendors can use it, and they DO use this information; they know that a personwho sounds happy is selling more than a person just using few words. This is something we all know and they know it too.

And you see the errors if you are looking for errors … but if you do not want to see an error somewhere (in yourself) you will not see it.
So; my bad luck depends on the circumstances but my neighbor is a son of a bitch who made himself unhappy buy buying the expensive house, having a bad job, behaving like an idiot… etc.