About forty years ago, two researchers—Ross and Sicoly—ran a set of quirky social experiments with couples, sports teams, and work groups. They asked each participant how much they believed they alone had contributed to a shared task. Picture a couple being asked, “How many dishes do you think you washed during the study?” When the researchers added both answers together, the total regularly topped 120 %. In other words, each partner thought they’d scrubbed way more plates than they actually had, while downplaying what the other person washed. The same pattern popped up in every group they tested.
We humans slip on two very different hats when it’s time to explain bad outcomes—one for ourselves and one for everybody else.
Their failure? We pin it squarely on them: their character, their choices, their execution.
Our own failure? Clearly the universe ganged up on us—circumstances, bad luck, the weather, Mercury in retrograde—anything but who we are.
Flip the script to success and the hats swap labels:
Our win? Hard-earned. Talent, grit, hustle.
Their win? A lucky break. Right place, right time.
Another study took this further. Participants first recalled a conversation purely from memory. Then they watched video of the same chat—from a camera angle pointing the opposite direction. Like magic, their explanations for who did what and why shifted once they saw it from the other side.
Psychologists have cataloged plenty of evidence for the self-serving bias and the actor–observer bias. The laundry list of causes is long—need for control, mental short-cuts, what our memory happens to store—but two stand above the rest:
Self-esteem armor. We protect our ego by claiming the credit and dodging the blame.
Perceptual salience. We judge whatever’s front-and-center in our field of view (usually them when they mess up, and the situation when we do).
Realizing our brain pulls these tricks is the first step toward freedom. Hanging up those two easy hats and choosing the single hat of objectivity and self-knowledge lets us manage ourselves better, grow empathy, build healthier relationships, and make sharper decisions.
As Epictetus put it, “We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by what we tell ourselves about what happens.” We can keep soothing ourselves with little white lies, or we can start telling the truth and grow until the old story stops stinging.
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This article was written for issue 185 of El Faro newspaper, and you can read the original Spanish version here.