The psychological trap that distorts how you see difficult people

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and I’m on a video call with an executive I’ll call Marcus, who is explaining to me, with real precision and a few colorful words, what is wrong with a peer of his I’ll call Dev.

Dev was recently quiet in a leadership meeting. Said nothing, nodded along. Then at 11 p.m., Dev sends an email to four people who were in the meeting, laying out every objection he didn’t raise while everyone was in the room. Marcus has been thinking about this for months. His theory: Dev is building a paper trail because he wants the job Marcus has. Dev is, in Marcus’s phrase, “playing a longer game than the rest of us.”

So I ask: “Have you asked him about it?”

Long pause: “Asked him what, exactly?”

I wrote down that exchange afterward, because I thought it was a great moment, and felt pretty good about myself. Nice work, Danny. Then I closed the laptop and drove home stewing about a colleague who takes four days to answer anything I send him and what that says about how seriously he takes my work. Ah.

Everybody keeps a file. Mine is about a man who takes four days to answer my emails, which I’ve taken as a sign of disrespect, on little to no evidence.

When other people do something, we pin it on their character. You walk too slowly on a crowded sidewalk, a grave sin, because you are a thoughtless, oblivious nincompoop. When we do the same thing, we explain it with our circumstances. I walk slowly on the sidewalk because I am contemplative, a modern-day sage thinking about how to become better. It is a privilege to be trapped behind my agonizing pace.

To Marcus, Dev sends the late email because Dev is political. Marcus sends the late email because the day got away from him, and he wanted to be thorough. Gracious with self, brutal with others.

When belief builds its own evidence

In 1971, the psychologists Edward E. Jones and Richard E. Nisbett named this the actor-observer asymmetry: Other people are what they do; I’m a product of the environment and circumstances I’m dealing with. This was a much-cited theory until Bertram Malle pooled 173 studies and found that, averaged out, it’s mostly not true. The one exception is when this comes roaring back for behavior we don’t like. We reach to explain someone’s character specifically when they’ve done something that annoys us. The trap of this bias means you tend to aim it at people you’ve already decided you don’t like. The colleague you’re most certain about is the one you have the least accurate information on because you have only ever looked for evidence to confirm your suspicions.

I’ve written before about how a belief about yourself builds its own evidence: You believe you’re bad at keeping in touch, so you don’t call, the friendships thin, and you come out thinking you were right all along. A belief about someone else runs the same loop, except worse, because you file evidence without ever giving the defense a chance to present their case. Poor legal proceedings and a good way to be right, but not a way to be honest.

Marcus stopped looping Dev into early conversations because why include someone building a case against you? So Dev found out about decisions after they were made. So Dev started raising objections in writing, at night, to four people, because by then it was the only channel left. Every email made Marcus more certain. Cue the spiral into building a file of evidence, and not a good one.

In an infuriating tendency of the human mind, real observations are filed once and are never easily revised. Without careful revisiting and scrutiny, your one-time perceptions are now making live decisions about a person who has possibly changed, or who possibly never matched the report in the first place.

“He’s threatened by me.” “She doesn’t respect my time.” “He’s coasting, and everyone can see it except leadership.” All real sentences you might carry that operate as unquestioned facts in your head. To look at it live is to be able to question it, permitting you to create a new, second explanation in which the person is competent, reasonable, and working under pressures you can’t see.

Is it true? I have no idea. But both versions — the one where they are bad, and the one where they are completely good — are made up. You’re missing information because you’ve never collected any from a state without bias. You found what you looked for. So let’s look for something different.

Conversational receptiveness

For Dev, there’s a story where Dev got burned in a meeting once. Publicly ripped to shreds in front of the entire team in a humiliating fashion that you wouldn’t wish on your worst work nemesis. Or Dev is protecting a team that got cut last year, and has decided that anything important goes in writing.

Once again, I have no clue if any of that is real. Neither does Marcus. That’s the point.

And you know what’s crazy? You can ask other people questions to learn what’s real. For Marcus to Dev: “I’ve noticed the objections tend to show up in email at night, and I’d rather have them in the room. What makes it easier to raise them afterward?”

Then listen. Mike Yeomans, Julia Minson, and colleagues have studied what makes disagreement actually go somewhere, and they call it conversational receptiveness. Restate their position before you give yours, in their words: “Here’s what I’m hearing you say. What am I missing?” Find the places to soften your certainty. Done well, they tell you the real reason, you both get to have an honest conversation about the real issue, and you get to add a different kind of evidence against the story that Dev is manipulative and trying to destroy you.

In my own life, when I’ve actually asked someone these questions, the reason has always been smaller than my theory. It’s been a brutal quarter. Or something tough is going on at home. And somewhere in it, more often than I’d like, it’s something I contributed to with a message I never flagged, an offhand irritable response, or a seat at the table I never offered.

You might also have a person you’ve already decided about, on evidence you quit updating a long time ago. And you might be wrong about them, too.

This article is featured on Big Think.