Eli Finkel

So your spouse is late.

Your spouse is disrespectful.

I mean, ideally not in a huge way.

But your spouse does something inconsiderate.

you have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you.

And in particular, you have control over whether you want to explain that behavior in terms of something about your spouse that's maybe stable and a characterological assessment, like my spouse is always such a jerk.

You can try instead to say, look, my spouse was a jerk just now, but he's under a lot of stress at work.

Or you can think, look, he probably tried the best he could.

You know, there was probably some traffic or some crisis at work.

I'm just going to let it ride.

Now, I'm not saying these are easy things to do because we do have a default to explain other people's behaviors as elements of their character.

But the fact is, and we should be better at understanding this, there are all sorts of things that contribute to why somebody engaged in one behavior over another behavior.

And we have some control over the extent to which we interpret our partner's inconsiderate or rude behavior in a way that's more generous and kind.

And the kinder approach will make us happier in the relationship, and our partner will probably be happier, too.

You also think that having what you call a growth mindset is a useful thing.

What do you mean by that?

So the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford, she's developed this idea that people differ in terms of how they think about various attributes.

So she studies intelligence, for example.

And people differ in the extent to which they think intelligence is something that's fixed and stable and you have it or you don't.

Versus it's malleable and it's something that you can develop over time.