let me first say that we are all blinded to the part we play in disputes by cognitive biases. Those biases include:
- fundamental attribution error (over-attributing intention and under-attributing circumstance to another’s harm-causing behavior while over-attributing circumstance and under-attributing intention to our own harm-causing behavior /1;
- clustering illusion (seeing patterns where none exist); and,
- confirmation bias (selecting from a vast amount of data only that which confirms our pre-existing opinions)
Mistakes about the intentions and motivations of our fellows, as well as the constraints under which they are working, are so common in the litigated disputes I mediate that I’ve been forced to acknowledge just how much of other people’s behavior is colored by my untested assumptions. It naturally follows that my part in disputes has loomed much larger in their resolution than they ever did before.
