SIGNIFICANCE OF EFFECTS

Most of us tend to be blind to the significance of interaction effects. For one thing, other people comprise much of the content of our thoughts; for another, our thoughts about people come to us in the guise of pure observations-like photographs barely affected by quirks of the camera. We look outside and think we are seeing what is there, whereas actually our own behavior plays a role in determining what we see. So strong is the illusion that our reactions to people are based wholly on our objective observations of them that when we change our attitudes toward people without seeing them, we tend to think we’ve made new discoveries about them as we remember them, not realizing that our own behavior since we were with them last may have accounted for the change in our view of them.