14 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal

You write these amazing mega threads. I love them. We're gonna go through as many of the concepts that we can get through today. The first one, false consensus effect. "Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac." George Carlin. Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don't just do whatever we consider normal. We also consider normal whatever we do.

Yeah, so I think this is a very important point because we only know ourselves, and we kind of, because we're so familiar with ourselves, we tend to use ourselves as the baseline by which we judge everything else. And this can cause problems, because let's say, um, if you're somebody who is around somebody else, uh, you're- and you're inclined to find this person annoying because they're not like you. There's two ways you can look at this. Either you can look at it as, "That person is annoying," or, "I am easily annoyed." And what people tend to do is they almost always err on the side of considering the other person annoying. You know, so this is just one example, but this is pretty much what we do in our, in our lives, up and down, everywhere, like we do it all over the shop. And the reason why I think it's important is because if we start asking ourselves, "Well, hang on a second, maybe I'm the issue, maybe I'm seeing things differently because of my experiences," we can actually get a more grounded understanding of actually what's going on. I've started doing this in my life a lot more, where if I feel a certain way about someone, I ask myself, "Is it me or is it them?" You know, it's something that a lot of people don't do. They just assume that it's the other person that's the problem, or they assume that something in the world is wrong rather than their perception. So that's the reason I include it. I think it always helps, it's a good heuristic to just double-check, just to ask yourself if there's something askew in the world, is it really askew or is it your perception? Is it your experiences that have put you askew from the world?

Is this related to the fundamental attribution error?

Yeah, to an extent. I mean, so with the fundamental attribution error, people have a tendency to attribute the sort of, uh, the failures of an ally to external circumstances, and the failures of an, uh, an enemy or opponent, uh, to their character. So you know, if, if, if your friend is late, "Oh, you know, they just got held up by the bus. The bus was the problem." But if an opponent is late, "Oh, they're just a horrible person. They're lazy," you know, all this stuff. So it does tend to... That's more of a tribal thing, but it- it does have an element of this false consensus effect to it, because we tend to see things relative to ourselves in that sense. So-