Beware of Cognitive Errors

"Attribution errors occur when we attribute behavior or some other quality to a person's character or disposition rather than to situation or environment--in other words, stereotyping. Our assumptions can blind us to the real causes or triggers of behavior.

Anchoring errors occur when we make our final diagnosis based on the direction our original diagnosis steered us in, closing our minds to other possibilities--which means our final diagnosis may be wildly inaccurate.

Confirmation bias, well known to mediators, is the very human tendency to seek out data that supports our assumptions and discount data that contradicts them."

For active links to related resources, see this Diane Levin post from which the foregoing was quoted.