While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions. When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation around us, to whatâs happening to us. If weâre doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesnât understand the situation thatâs forcing us to act that way. This tendency is called the Actor-Observer Bias, and itâs one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem.
These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you areâyour drive, or style, or effort, sayâwhich in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.
And by the way, if you think about it, much of the world of work is designed this wayâitâs designed for Those Other People, who need to be told what to do (hence planning instead of intelligence), whose work needs aligning (hence goals over meaning and purpose), and whose weaknesses put us all at risk (hence the deficit thinking we saw in the last chapter, instead of the focus on distinctive abilities). One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but donât see in ourselves.