Naive Cynicism: Expecting Others to Be More Self-Serving Than They Are

Naive cynicism is a theory about other people's minds that happens to be wrong in a predictable direction. Most people know that judgments of responsibility can be self-serving, and they apply that knowledge to everyone but themselves: the other person, they assume, will take the credit and shed the blame. Kruger and Gilovich showed in 1999 that this assumption is held even when the other person's actual allocations are not self-serving, so the cynicism is naive in the sense that it is applied by default, without checking.

A second finding sits beside it. Ross and Sicoly had shown in 1979 that both partners in a couple tend to claim more than their share of joint activities, pleasant and unpleasant alike, so that the two claims add up to more than the whole. That is an egocentric bias: your own contributions are easier to recall, so your share looks larger whatever the activity. What Kruger and Gilovich's participants expected from their partners was something else, a motivated pattern of grabbing credit and dodging blame, and they expected it whether or not the partner's actual allocations were self-serving. The two patterns are easy to confuse because both end in someone claiming too much, but they come apart on the bad outcomes: an egocentric allocator claims a large share of the blame as well, a self-serving one does not.

The expectation is sensitive to motive, which is a clue to where it comes from. In the debating and darts studies, participants assumed their teammates would be less biased than their opponents. People seem to reason from what they think the other person wants: an opponent wants to win, so an opponent will judge in their own favor. The reasoning is not foolish. It is just applied as if wanting a result were enough to distort a judgment, and applied without checking: the expectation held whether or not the other person's actual allocations were biased, which is what makes the cynicism naive.

Naive cynicism belongs to a wider family of findings about the overestimation of self-interest. Miller and Ratner showed in 1998 that people overestimate how much financial reward and group membership drive their peers' attitudes and behavior, and Miller argued in 1999 that a cultural norm of self-interest leads people to expect it in others, and sometimes to perform it themselves so as not to look naive. Cynicism about others is in that sense learned, and it is learned in excess of the facts.

Justin Kruger and Thomas Gilovich published "'Naive cynicism' in everyday theories of responsibility assessment: On biased assumptions of bias" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999. The paper reports four studies with the same core design. Participants divided responsibility for a series of joint outcomes, some desirable and some undesirable, between themselves and another person, and then estimated how that other person would divide the same responsibility.

The four samples were chosen to vary the relationship. Study 1 used married couples, who allocated responsibility for events in their marriage. Study 2 used video game enthusiasts. Study 3 used debaters and Study 4 darts players, settings in which the other person could be a teammate or an opponent. In every study the finding was the same: participants expected the other person's allocations, but not their own, to be motivationally biased, with the other person taking more credit for the good outcomes and less responsibility for the bad ones. The expectation held regardless of whether the other person's actual allocations were biased in that way.

The teammate and opponent comparison in the last two studies added the moderating finding. Participants assumed their teammates would be less self-serving than their opponents, which the authors read as evidence that lay theories of bias track factors known to affect motivation. The cynicism, in other words, is not indiscriminate; it is aimed at the people who have a stake against you, and it overshoots there.

The paper sits on Ross and Sicoly's 1979 finding. In their first study, both members of 37 married couples separately marked their own share of each of 20 household activities on a line running from primarily the wife to primarily the husband, and on 16 of the 20 the two marks summed to more than the whole. Those couples overclaimed the unwelcome activities too, such as causing arguments, which is what distinguishes an egocentric bias from a self-serving one. Kruger and Gilovich's contribution was to show that people expect a self-serving pattern in others, credit claimed and blame declined, and expect it whether or not the other person's allocations show it. The demo on this page asks how a housemate would split the credit for one good outcome and the blame for one bad one in that spirit; it does not reproduce either paper's procedure.

The rows below are illustrations of where the expectation of self-serving judgment in others shows up, not findings from the studies cited on this page.

The counter is to check the cynical prediction against what the other person actually says, the step the prediction skips.

• Ask before you assume. The participants in 1999 predicted a self-serving allocation whether or not their partners had made one. One question would have shown that.
• Separate egocentric from self-serving. If someone claims a large share of a task, ask whether they also claim a large share of the unpleasant ones. If they do, the pattern is egocentric rather than self-serving, and the usual explanation is memory rather than strategy.
• Apply the theory to yourself. If you expect the other person to be biased by what they want, your own stake is the same kind of fact about you.
• Keep records where shares matter. Housework, authorship and credit for sales are all places where a written log replaces two biased memories and two cynical predictions.
• Notice the teammate exemption. If you trust your own side's judgment and distrust the other side's, the difference is their stake, and a stake is a reason to check, not a verdict.

Several biases describe how the self and others are judged differently. Naive cynicism is a belief about other people's bias, not a bias in one's own allocations.

• It is not egocentric bias, the inflated sense of one's own share of a joint effort. That is the bias Ross and Sicoly documented in couples, and it runs in both directions, for credit and for blame. Naive cynicism is the mistaken expectation that others show a different, self-serving one.
• It is not the bias blind spot, which is seeing bias in others more readily than in oneself in general. Naive cynicism is a specific instance with a specific content: others are expected to be motivated by self-interest.
• It is not naive realism, the sense that you see the world as it is, so that disagreement must come from the other person's ignorance or bias. Naive realism reaches the motive after the disagreement appears; naive cynicism supplies it in advance.