Actors, observers, asymmetries

Today's Self & Other class focused mostly on Bertram Malle's work debunking the textbook version of the "actor-observer asymmetry."* It's pretty cool. The textbook version is easy to grasp intuitively, but Bertram had earlier showed - using quite a lot of published studies - that this theory wasn't supported by the research, except in special cases. He then came up with an alternative that's much more complex, and thus both more likely to match "reality" and less likely to get popularized. Ah, politics. Bertram has recently left the UO for Brown, unfortunately.

The weather was unusually warm, and I put in a burst of effort after dinner to plant a bunch of displaced iris, so that they wouldn't have to spend yet another day drying out in the sunshine.

* Why do I keep typing that as "assymetry"? Is it that I can't help but think of "Assyrians"?