Why Everyone Else Is an Idiot

But you’re just having a bad day

You’re late to work. Again. 

As you sneak into the conference room, avoiding eye contact with your notoriously crotchety boss, your brain’s already machine-gunning a litany of perfectly reasonable explanations. 

Bad traffic. 

Your kid couldn’t find their science project. 

The coffee maker broke. 

You forgot your umbrella.

Thankfully, your boss never asks. He just glowers.

Right after you take your seat, your colleague also sneaks in. Your boss starts to look a little like a thwarted Yosemite Sam:

Dang rabbits

And you know what? He’s right to be angry. 

Sarah’s always late and this is just classic. She’s so irresponsible. She probably stayed up binge-watching Succession again. 

The Actor / Observer bias

Welcome to the actor/observer bias, a cognitive bias that’ll poison your relationships, sabotage your career, and keep you stuck in the same danged patterns year on year on year.

Back in 1971, Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett reported a series of experiments that would fundamentally change how we understand interpersonal judgment. Their proposition: “Actors attribute their behavior to situational constraints while observers attribute the behavior to dispositions of the actor.”

In other words, when I do something, it’s because of my circumstances, but when you do something, it’s because of something inherent in you. Mistakes are things I do, but mistakes are who you are.

In one set of elegant experiments, subjects (all students) were asked to read essays and listen to speeches allegedly written by their fellow students. These essays covered the contentious topics of the day, such as Castro’s Cuba and segregation. 

The subjects were also told that the positions taken in these essays and speeches were assigned. In other words, they were told that the person giving a speech had been instructed to deliver a “short cogent defense of Castro’s Cuba.” They didn’t have a choice of which side to take.

The results are fascinating:

Despite the fact that the subjects seem to have clearly perceived the heavy constraints on the communicator… their estimates of the true opinion of the communicator were markedly affected by the particular position espoused. When subjects read an essay or speech supporting Castro’s Cuba, they inferred that the communicator was pro-Castro.

So, even though the subjects knew that the person giving the speech had no choice of what position to take, they still attributed the position they took to some inherent preference in the speaker anyway!

That’s what happens when we observe others. But do we make the same assumptions when we observe ourselves?

Of course not.

In another set of experiments, male college students were asked to write a short paragraph about why they chose their major and their girlfriend. They were also asked to write the same paragraphs about their best friends—why did their best friends chose their majors and the girls they dated? (Side note, yes, this is heteronormative. What can I say? It was 1971).

They coded each response into situational (“Chemistry is a high-paying field,” or “She’s a very warm person”) vs. personal attributes (“They want to make a lot of money” or “I need a warm person in my life.”) In other words, the first set of responses is about something or someone other than the person acting, while the second set is all about the people themselves.

They found that when describing why they chose their majors and girlfriends, the subjects used twice as many situational phrases as personal ones. On the other hand, when they described why their best friends chose majors and girlfriends, the ratio flipped, and up to three times more personal language was used.

That is the actor / observer bias: we attribute our decisions to the situations we find ourselves in, and others decisions to something about them. 

In other words, we literally see different movies when we watch ourselves versus others.

Your Brain’s Double Standard

Let me get personal. I (try to) publish this blog three Tuesdays a month, reserving the last Tuesday for other things.

If you go through my stories, though, you know that’s not actually true. I took a few weeks off at the end of February / beginning of March, for example. Not officially, no announcements… I just didn’t publish. 

Of course, I had all sorts of reasons for this. The schedule felt punishing (nobody’s fault but my own). My clients had more demands on my time. My ads weren’t performing as well as they should be. Mercury was about to go into retrograde.

But when another writer I follow missed their usual Tuesday post for a few weeks? Well, now, that was different. She’s disorganized. 

Listen, I’m not proud of that double standard. But I’m also not unique.

We’ve all got two competing internal monologues: one for judging ourselves (circumstances-based) and one for judging others (personality-based).

From inside your own life, you can see all the external pressures, the unusual circumstances, the perfect storm of events that explain your behavior. After all, you’re the star of a complex drama with a million moving parts.

But when you watch someone else, you see a character in a much simpler story. They cut you off in traffic because they’re the kind of jerk who drives a BMW and doesn’t use their blinker—not because they’re late to work. They snapped at you because they’re mean, not because they’re going through a divorce. They didn’t respond to your text because they’re dismissive and disrespectful, not because they were doing a week-long stretch of night shifts.

The Actor / Observer Bias Destroys Relationships…

Think about the last time you fought with your partner. Could be a little spat about whose turn it was to take out the trash, or one of those awful fights that can destroy foundations.

I’ll bet you anything that, in the moment, you had reasons for saying the things you said. You were stressed about work. Your partner had been needling you all week. You hadn’t slept well.

But them? The things they said? Well, that was just cruel. And what if that cruelty is just who they are, something they’ve been masking for the last six years? They definitely have a mean streak, and they’ve finally shown you their true colors.

This is the actor / observer bias in its most destructive form. 

Every fight becomes a morality play where you’re the flawed-but-relatable protagonist and they’re the villain. Every disappointment becomes evidence of their character flaws rather than their circumstances.

And you know what’s really insidious about this? The actor / observer bias can sometimes turn self-fulfilling. Tell someone they’re “always late” enough times, and what incentive do they have to change? Any time they slip up, you’re going to remind them that they’re always late. They might as well start living down to your expectations. 

…And It Keeps You Stuck in Jobs You Can’t Leave

Why are you still at a job you complain about every night? 

Well, the economy’s tough, right? You’ve got bills to pay. The job market in your field is brutal. The right opportunity hasn’t come around. Your burnout isn’t that bad anyway. 

Now think about that friend who’s been complaining about their job for three years straight. What’s your internal explanation for why they won’t leave? Maybe they’re scared. They’re lazy. They lack ambition. You can see they should leave. All your friends can see they should leave. But they’ve always just been all talk, no action. 

See the problem?

When I was younger, I spent years dating the same type of person in different bodies. Each time the relationship ended, it was either because I was the victim of circumstances—she moved away, I moved away, she had family stuff to deal with—or because there was something wrong with her. It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that I was the common denominator. 

Why Your Next Job Or Relationship Will Suck Too (Unless You Do the Work)

Sometimes you need to leave. You need to leave the relationship, leave the job, move to a new city. Hell, my entire business is helping people in healthcare make those difficult decisions with clarity and confidence. 

But there’s something none of us want to hear: leaving that soul-sucking job or toxic relationship won’t fix anything if you’re taking your patterns with you.

You can leave the partner who “never listens,” but if you keep choosing people who remind you of your emotionally unavailable parent, guess what? Your next partner won’t listen either. Not because the universe hates you, but because you’re still playing out the same script with different actors.

This is what the actor/observer bias blinds us to: sometimes we’re not stuck in bad situations. We’re stuck in bad patterns. And until we do the internal work of recognizing these patterns, we’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The real work is finding better circumstances and it’s noticing how you contribute to the patterns you claim to hate. It’s catching yourself when you’re about to explain away your behavior while judging someone else’s. It’s asking the uncomfortable question: “What if I’m the problem, and they’re the circumstances?”

If you don’t do this work, you’re simply going from one frying pan into another. Your next job will have the same problems. Your next relationship will end the same way. Your next fresh start will get stale in exactly the same timeframe.

Become a Reliable Narrator

What Jones and Nisbett’s research teaches us is that we’re all unreliable narrators. We give ourselves the grace that we don’t extend to others. We see our lives as complex narratives while reducing others to simple storylines.

And that’s human, sure. Sometimes we need to believe our own PR to get through the day.

But it’s still a bias. 

And recognizing this bias is the first step to breaking free from it. Not to judge ourselves more harshly, but to judge others more gently. To see the circumstances in their actions and the person in our own. 

Everyone else isn’t an idiot. They’re just having a bad day too.

And once you realize that, everything changes. Your relationships get deeper. Your job situation gets clearer. 

Your patterns finally start to make sense. Even if that’s uncomfortable as hell.

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→ Healthcare folks: Are you stuck in the same jobs, same relationships, and same burnout? Ready to fall love with your life again? Check out my free webinar on creating your Burnout Escape Plan, one science-backed decision at a time.

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