We all make assumptions and judgments of others – but did you know there is a bias we have in our judgements?

This bias shows up in all of our relationships and it can create an opposition and divide in places we actually want empathy and compassion. 

In this episode we explore the Fundamental Attribution Bias, how it impacts our relationships and what to do about it. 

As mentioned in the episode, you can find the Spotify playlists here, and sign up for Simple Saturdays here. 

Key topics covered in this episode 

• The purpose of relationships, how this has shifted over generations
  
  
  
  • Relationships and wellbeing: The Havard Adult Development Study 
  
  
  
  


• Making assumptions about others
  
  
  
  • Filling in the blanks and mind-reading
    
    
    
    • 199. Mindset traps to be aware of (cognitive distortions that might be holding you back in motherhood and life)
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Perception is a projection, how our judgements and assumptions can reflect our own struggles and opinions
  
  
  
  


• The Fundamental Attribution Bias
  
  
  
  • How we judge the action of others vs how we judge: character or circumstance 
  
  
  
  


• The me vs them mentality (or Us vs Them)


• Examples of it in marriage
  
  
  
  • 62. My husband put the groceries away wrong, he doesn’t care about me (love languages and expectations in marriage)
  
  
  
  


• Awareness and empathy
  
  
  
  • 84. How parenting with empathy can transform your relationship
  
  
  • 85. When empathy is hard in marriage and friendships
  
  
  
  


• Accepting the hard parts of ourselves
  
  
  
  • 162. Think the best of me, or not. Allowing the hard and awesome in ourselves and in our lives.
  
  
  
  


• Getting 1:1 coaching support
  
  
  
  • Book a session with Shawna here
  
  
  
  

FULL TRANSCRIPT

(unedited)

Hey guys, it’s Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor from simple on purpose.ca Welcome to the simple on purpose podcast. I want to give you a heads up right away this podcast will retire for the summer. So just a heads up. Our summer starts at the end of June. I encourage you in those months to use the archives, we have over five years of episodes on all of the topics. So if you want to be intentional about listening to them, I suggest you use the Spotify playlists and define those, you can go to simple on purpose.ca and click listen. You’ll find the links to the playlist we’ve got them on different topics like habit change mom on purpose, life on purpose, minimalism emotions, they’re all there for you check them out. And this summer also follow along with a simple Saturday’s email. If you aren’t a subscriber, I definitely encourage you to join that that is just a really like, warm and cozy place that I love to be with you guys. It comes out every two weeks, so it’s not gonna overwhelm your inbox. And I like to share some simple and purposes, purpose thoughts, some posts you might like. And that’s actually where you guys gave me this nickname, your nerdy girlfriend. So it’s a really great space to be. I’ll link that in the show notes as well. Let’s get into today’s episode this month, we’re talking about relationships. What is the purpose of a relationship? Is it to support your survival, emotional support, to entertain you to find love to find connection. This has definitely changed over the years of purpose of a relationship, especially if you look in the context of a marriage. It used to be about survival for a woman to be under the care of a man that was the world that was the culture unfortunately, it still is in some places. But even friends and communities, there was a need for support and survival, there was a need to do things together. So it is a more modern concept that our relationships are there to entertain us to make us feel loved to feel connected and seen and valued for the better and the worst, right, and that’s a whole other topic. But we all know that we are a social species. And maybe some of us feel that it is definitely true, that relationships are important to us to our to our well being.

studies have concluded this that supportive relationships are actually the number one predictor of well being in your life, it’s not money, it’s not your health or your job or how trendy your clothes are. It is people deep relationships. This is from the longest running study on the topic called that Harvard adult development study. If you have some people in your life, and it doesn’t need to be a lot that you feel like you can rely on who you support, and they support you that is the highest predictor of feeling well being in your life. Kind of crazy. So we know deep within us that we need relationships for many reasons. However, we run into obstacles just to be in the daily life of relationships with others, I want to talk about a common way that we create opposition in our relationships. And that is our assumptions. We fill in the blanks a lot. We fill in the blanks on what others are thinking we do this more often than we should probably we mind read. Have you ever mind read what your husband was thinking and decided he’s probably mad at, you know, just me, we fill in the blanks on what others are thinking, often what they’re thinking about us, they think I’m overreacting, they don’t think I’m good enough. They think I don’t know what I’m talking about. They know why I’m mad, and they just don’t want to admit it. And a lot can be said for what we’re projecting of ourselves and our own insecurities into this blank space. We also make assumptions about why they’re doing what they’re doing, what are their motives. And this is where I want to talk about the fundamental attribution bias, which is about this bias that we have when we look at what other people are doing, and what our brain makes it mean about them. Now, I don’t think this about people that don’t want to give an example, if you see somebody who doesn’t take the grocery cart back and you are someone who takes the grocery cart back, what are you thinking? Are they are they lazy? So I live in a town where the carts are free, you might live in a world where you gotta get that coin back. And you might come to different conclusions. But this can go the other way, right? So imagine you’re someone who never takes the cart back. And you see that person across the parking lot who is taking the cart back? What pops up for you? They’re probably judging me. Oh, they think they’re so great. We do this really quietly in the back of our minds. We look at other people’s actions, and we make assumptions about the type of person that they are. We’ve heard so often actions speak louder than words but we forget that any action can have a lot of circumstances, thoughts. feelings experiences conditions that express that action that lead up to that action. And I’m not talking about obvious situations where someone is causing harm or acting unethically in a morally, I’m talking more of that day to day stuff in our relationships, the things we judge in those around us. Relate relationships are one of the most common topics in counseling, because we know we need relationships. So when our close relationships feel off, our sense of stability feels off. Relationships, our deepest work, we live in relation to others, others are a mirror for us, a mirror for our own defenses, our triggers, our measuring sticks, our struggles, the things we rejected ourselves, our self judgment, perception is a projection, our experience of, well, anything but our experience of another person depends on us. So imagine we’re reading a book or watching a movie or someone said something, really anything, we