Oh the errors we make

Personally I’m super interested in clinical psychology, so I found the counterfactual thinking heuristic as something that could be taken advantage of in therapy. Specifically, the counterfactual thinking heuristic refers to people’s reflection on situations and events in order to generate alternative outcomes that could have happened but didn’t. Both positive and negative events have different psychological effects that are dependent on how people think about “what might have been.” Therapists and counselors could take advantage of this heuristic by urging patients to prepare for potentially bad situations (e.g. results of a wife’s CT scan for a brain tumor) by imagining the worst possible outcome. Ideally, if the patient can come to grips with a horrible hypothetical situation they will be more prepared to deal with it should it become a reality.

Another concept I realized I use almost daily in my personal life is Bem’s self-perception theory. The theory states that by observing your own behavior, you learn about yourself. Kassin, Fein, and Markus (2008) include a quote in their textbook in order to clarify the concept. E. M. Forster asked, “How can I tell what I think ‘til I see what I say,” which demonstrates the type of questions that the self-perception theory attempts to address. The theory would argue that you don’t know, oftentimes you can only make inferences about your behavior by watching the behavior itself. The book provides examples such as realizing the extent of your anger only after listening to how fiercely you were arguing. Personally, I provide evidence for this theory fairly regularly. I am extremely indecisive! So, when I make small decisions, like which restaurant I’d like to eat at for dinner, I narrow my choices down to two (e.g. Chipotle, and Chick-fil-a), and then say, “I’m going to Chipotle!” out loud. If I don’t feel satisfied when I say this I proceed to say, “I’m going to Chick-fil-a!” and see if that feels better. I’ve started to use this same procedure on my friends and they love it!

Lastly, I thought it was really funny that Dr. Giuliano talked about “road rage” or driving in traffic as an example of the actor-observer effect. My dad is a perfect example! The actor-observer effect is a type of fundamental attribution error and it occurs when people see others behavior as a reflection of their personality, but see their own action as dependent on the situation. My father thinks practically every driver on I-35 during rush hour is a “bad driver, and idiot” who “has no clue what they’re doing.” It has always really annoyed me, and I always defend the other drivers because he has no clue what is causing them to drive the way they do...Me listing the many possible reasons, other than their stupidity, for their sub-par driving skills never fails to annoy the shit out of my dad, so I’ve recently kept my mouth shut. I’d rather try to keep his blood-pressure low than defend random people who have no idea we’re talking about them.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Social Psychology. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.