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Some people believe they are the sole cause of other people's
actions and feelings: "I am making him so depressed." Not only do
some people feel in control, others feel they should be in control, i.e.
have special privileges (a prince in disguise). "I shouldn't have to help
clean up at work." "Everybody should treat me nicely."
A special form of over-simplification is cognitive bias, i.e. a
proneness to perceive or think about something in a certain way to the
exclusion of other ways. One person will consistently see challenges as
threats, while another person will respond to the same challenging
assignments as opportunities to strut his/her stuff. Cognitive biases
have already been mentioned in several psychological disorders, e.g.:
Problem
Thinking bias
Anxiety
Expectation that things will go wrong.
Anorexia
A belief that one is getting fat and that's terrible.
Depression
Negative view of self, the world, the future.
Anger
A belief that others were unfair and hurtful;
Conformity
Exaggeration of the importance of pleasing others.
Social addiction
I can only have fun with my friends.
There is one cognitive bias so common it is called the
fundamental attribution error: we tend to see our behavior and
feelings as caused by the environment but we think others' behavior
and feelings are caused by their personality traits, needs, and
attitudes. In short, we are psychoanalysts with others but situationists
with ourselves. Example: When rules are laid down to a teenager, the
action is seen by the parents as being required by the situation, i.e. to
help the adolescent learn to be responsible, but the teenager becomes
a little Freud and sees the rules as being caused by the parents' need
to control, distrust, or meanness. When rules are broken, however, it
is because "the kid is rebellious" (parents now do the psychoanalyzing)
or "my friends wanted me to do something else and, besides, my
parents' rules are silly" (the teenaged Freud suddenly doesn't apply
this psychology stuff to him/herself). This kind of thinking is over-
simplified and self-serving. More importantly, it causes great
resentment because the troubles in a relationship are attributed to the
bad, mean, selfish traits of the other person.
In spite of the fundamental attribution error, we will make an
exception for ourselves when we are successful: Our successes are
attributed to positive internal, not situational, factors--our ability, our
hard work, or our good traits. In keeping with the fundamental
attribution error, our failures are usually considered due to bad
external factors--the lousy system, the terrible weather, someone
else's fault, bad luck, and so on. Sometimes we are so desperate to
protect our ego from admitting we don't have the ability to do
something that we will actually arrange to have a handicap (see self-
handicapping in method #1) or excuse for failing, "I was drunk," "I
