It’s 10pm on a Tuesday night. You’ve been up since 5:00am and the numbers on the clock are starting to blur together. Your children are finally asleep after a normal bedtime routine turned into a relentless battle of the wills between parent and child. The last time you checked, there was a pile of dishes in the sink and toys in the living room that needed to be picked up. You’re hoping your spouse helped out, but instead you find them sitting on the couch watching TV. None of the chores are done. In sheer exhaustion you can’t hide your annoyance with them and an argument ensues.

Early the next morning your friend calls and you tell him/her about the argument you had the night before with your spouse.

“He/she was so snippy when he/she talked to me. He/she is such a jerk. I was so tired because I got up early and the kids were relentless at bedtime. I had a right to be crabby, he/she, however, did not,” you say.

Right there, you just fell into the actor-observer difference. Little did you know, your spouse got stuck in traffic on their way home from work after getting reprimanded by their boss for a mistake they didn’t make. Their day was rough, but instead you attributed their lack of helping behavior and snippy attitude to their personality. At the same time, you attributed your own snippy behavior to your frustration with your kids’ late bedtime. The actor-observer difference occurs when we see others’ behavior as a result of internal factors and our own as a result of external factors (Gruman, Schneider & Coutts, 2017). In this case, though both you and your spouse were snippy with each other, you concluded your spouse was a jerk while also concluding that you were just tired.

Another example of the actor-observer difference in daily life is in traffic mishaps. If a person cuts you off you might assume they are a jerk and get angry at their carelessness. You attributed their behavior of cutting you off to be a demonstration of their own internal traits or character. However, are there really any drivers that haven’t made a mistake at least once while driving? Have you ever gotten distracted and accidently swerved into another lane?

The actor-observer difference could easily transpire in the workplace as well. Say you mess up and forget a deadline and you explain to your new boss it was because you had to help another employee with something. This is you, the actor, attributing your behavior to an external factor. Your boss, the observer, might see this missed deadline as you being lazy (internal factor). Sometimes in the workplace, supervisors blame employees for performance issues when they weren’t actually their fault. At the very same time, employees in the workplace can overemphasize situational factors as the cause of their performance issues without taking any fault. This can cause disagreements between employees and management in performance appraisals (Gruman et. al., 2017).

The actor-observer difference can be present in various areas of our everyday lives. It can happen when we are driving to work, when we are interacting with our employer and when we get home and interact with our family. Its bias is a self-coping mechanism that can happen nearly unconsciously. The only way to get ahead of it is to be more aware of the attributions we make in not only our own behavior but in others’ as well. Through awareness, we have the possibility to intervene in our evaluations of behavior long before false judgements take place.

References

Gruman, J.A.,Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.