ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that the social self adapts to the social other by using a cognitive tool for pragmatic, interactive purposes. In social psychology, the discussion of self-other asymmetries typically focuses on a single asymmetry that between behavior explanations by actors, who are said to be using more situation causes, and observers, who are said to be using more person causes. The chapter discusses a model of behavior explanation that considers the folk-conceptual distinctions people themselves use when explaining behavior, distinctions that take us significantly beyond the classic attribution dichotomy of person/situation causes. It explores intimacy and finds that among intimates the observability gap was cut in half and the intentionality gap disappeared. After assessing actor-observer asymmetries at the level of which behavioral events people attend to and which events they wonder about and explain, it explains actor-observer asymmetries at the level of how people explain behavior.
