It gets better and better

Expecting negative events means you are never disappointed. Being suspicious about the motives of others won't leave you gasping when you are tricked.

Attributions are the reasons or explanations that we attach to things. If we see the dog standing by the front door with the leash in its mouth we assume it wants to go for a walk. If we find a book in our significant others desk or dresser that instructs you how to get that man/woman you've always had your eye on....we assume that he/she is going to be unfaithful.

It's just the way we are built, it will probably happen again and there's no changing it.

The type of attributions I make about my partner's behavior will have an important affect on whether I can get over what they've done, or not. It will also affect whether I can save the relationship - thats if I want to do that. Even if I don't want to save the relationship, adopting the wrong attributional style could have serious consequences for my sanity.

The reason attributions are important is that they're directly related to whether or not we can forgive. On the other hand, if you think there's no changing your partner then there's less chance of forgiving them.

Accessing our own higher mental processes is often difficult. Some of us have found it easy to manipulate the reasons we give for decisions, judgements or actions. Worse than this, even when we're not actively being manipulated, we regularly fool ourselves without the need of any encouragement.

Many of our actions, thoughts and feelings are probably motivated by things that happened a long time ago. The problem is that over time we easily forget. Even things that only happened recently may also pass quickly out of conscious thought, and so we don't consider them. Sometimes the mechanics of our thoughts are just plain weird.

Sometimes great effects are produced by tiny causes. Think of the metaphor used to explain Chaos Theory about the butterfly flapping its wings over China causing a huge storm in another part of the world.

Intuitively these sorts of explanations don't appeal to you or me. Great effects should have great causes. Because of this we're likely to miss the connection between cause and effect when there is a mismatch in size.

Knowing about each of these biases is more than interesting, it is genuinely helpful in everyday life. It is sometimes easy to form the impression that we know the reasons for the things we do and think. Continually feeding this misapprehension is our need to feel in control of ourselves...and sometimes others