We'll continue with giving feedback in the next video.
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Well, we've concluded the first part of the video and
now we're going to give you a bonus feature.
Some of you may want to know a little bit more about the psychology behind
our advice about giving impersonal feedback.
Well, we're going to talk about that now.
I call this strictly a bonus feature for
those of you who like to know kind of why we're giving this advice.
There's a tendency to describe the behavior of others in terms of traits or
personality traits, as we were talking about.
And it is called the actor observer bias.
That is, we use trait terms or personality terms to describe others.
For example, if you see someone knitted a beautiful scarf and
it's ten feet long and it has all sorts of great detail in it,
you think, wow, that scarf knitter is very creative.
We don't think, wow, I bet he spent hundreds of hours learning to knit, and
pored over thousands of magazines to get creative ideas for that killer scarf.
We may describe people in trade terms because we do not
have access to the story behind the scenes.
That is, information about how much time the knitter practiced and
how he got his ideas in the first place.
Interestingly, when we evaluate ourselves,
we do have access to the background information and we tend to use it.
For example, my grandmother taught me how to knit when I was a child and
that's why I can knit today.
So there's sort of a general inconsistency.
In evaluating others we use traits and
evaluating ourselves we take into account situational factors.
One more example may help.
Let's say a teacher observes a student entering the class about ten minutes late
after a class begins.
What is the teacher going to think?
The teacher may think, whoa, this student is a little bit rude,
maybe disrespectful, could be disorganized.
These are personality traits.
And what's going on in the student's mind?
The student is thinking, whoa.
The bus was late and I tried really,
really hard to get into class on time because learning is important to me.
Totally different explanations of the situation.
Neither party has access to the other party's information.
It is helpful to understand the actor observer bias because it helps explain
why the person on the receiving end of the feedback may look at things
quite differently than the person giving the feedback.
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