Egocentric Bias

Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective, knowledge or point of view when judging a situation, remembering a shared event or estimating one's own relative contribution to a joint effort, resulting in systematically self-centered distortions of judgment and memory. Classic demonstrations of the effect include studies in which spouses or collaborators, asked separately to estimate their own percentage contribution to household chores or joint work, produce estimates that sum to well over one hundred percent, a pattern documented in research including a 1979 study by the psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly. The bias is discussed across social and cognitive psychology as arising partly because each person has much richer access to their own efforts, thoughts and intentions than to those of others, making one's own contribution more salient and available in memory.