Two of the most valuable things I learned studying psychology came from an Intro to Social Psychology course I took in 2006.
The first is the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is people's tendency to attribute other people's behavior to their inherent traits, but attribute their own behavior to circumstances.
In other words, I tend to believe that other people do bad things because they are bad, but that *I* do bad things because reasons.
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I love this and just to add on as a beliefs psychologist, it's not *just* FAE you're describing, but we exercise domain-specific and contextually-different attribution errors about this type of explanation.
For instance, we do this across groups with ingroup bias. We attribute greater morality to the actions of ingroup members, and are more likely to see justified reasons for their actions, but flatten the reasons we see for outgroup members' actions
The other is the concept of spotlighting.
The spotlight effect is the tendency to assume that we are more salient to other people than we actually are. We assume that everyone is noticing everything we do and every detail of our physical presentation.
In reality, everybody else is just as busy and wrapped up in their own shit as we are, so we overestimate how much they notice about us.
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