Originally Posted by Mike33

Sometimes people are just rude and other times they're aren't aware of what they're doing. For instance, the guy might not have been paying attention and at the last moment noticed somebody in the way, not realizing it was an old woman, he just blurted out some epithets to tell her to move. It's hard to tell what is going on sometimes.

For example, if a car in front of you swerves, you might think he's a lunatic driver, without realizing that he saw something on the road that you didn't (or maybe he thought he did). They call this the Fundamental Attribution Error - when we attribute intent/actions to somebody based on our perspective of the event rather than seeing and knowing it from theres.