Other people's behaviour acts as a cue for what to do, buy, or believe.
More quotesOur mistakes come with footnotes. Other people’s mistakes come with verdicts.
I miss a deadline because priorities shifted, dependencies moved and the brief arrived late. You miss one because you lack discipline. My lucky win reflects judgement; yours reflects a soft territory. Conveniently, the universe is complicated whenever it explains me and wonderfully simple whenever it explains you.
The better-than-average illusion makes this worse. Drivers, leaders and forecasters keep placing themselves above the line even when arithmetic objects.
At work, this produces more than wounded feelings. A leadership team assumes its transformation will beat the usual failure rate because its slides look unusually expensive. A security expert lectures users about overconfidence while believing no phishing email could fool an expert. A manager rates themselves brilliant at listening, based mainly on having heard their own voice all day.
Humility need not become a beige ritual of pretending nobody knows anything. It needs symmetry. Give another person the situational explanation you would claim for yourself. Apply the outside-view failure rate to your treasured project. Write the prediction down before the outcome allows memory to renovate it. Ask for behavioural evidence, not compliments about broad virtues.
The statistical rules applying to those idiots over there have an irritating habit of applying to us too.