The Responsibility Bias
To understand this puzzle, we need to take a trip to Canada, where psychologists have been asking
married couples to put their relationships on the line. Think about your marriage, or your most recent
romantic relationship. Of the total effort that goes into the relationship, from making dinner and
planning dates to taking out the garbage and resolving conflicts, what percentage of the work do you
handle?
Let’s say you claim responsibility for 55 percent of the total effort in the relationship. If you’re
perfectly calibrated, your partner will claim responsibility for 45 percent, and your estimates will
add up to 100 percent. In actuality, psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that three out
of every four couples add up to significantly more than 100 percent. Partners overestimate their own
contributions. This is known as the responsibility bias: exaggerating our own contributions relative to
others’ inputs. It’s a mistake to which takers are especially vulnerable, and it’s partially driven by the
desire to see and present ourselves positively. In line with this idea, Jonas Salk certainly didn’t avoid
the spotlight. “One of his great gifts,” Oshinsky writes, “was a knack for putting himself forward in a
manner that made him seem genuinely indifferent to his fame.... Reporters and photographers would
always find Salk grudging but available. He would warn them not to waste too much of his time; he
would grouse about the important work they were keeping him from doing; and then, having lodged
his formulaic protest, he would fully accommodate.”
But there’s another factor at play that’s both more powerful and more flattering: information
discrepancy. We have more access to information about our own contributions than the contributions
of others. We see all of our own efforts, but we only witness a subset of our partners’ efforts. When
we think about who deserves the credit, we have more knowledge of our own contributions. Indeed,
when asked to list each spouse’s specific contributions to their marriage, on average, people were
able to come up with eleven of their own contributions, but only eight of their partners’ contributions.
When Salk claimed sole credit for the polio vaccine, he had vivid memories of the blood, sweat,
and tears that he invested in developing the vaccine, but comparatively little information about his
colleagues’ contributions. He literally hadn’t experienced what Youngner and the rest of the team did
—and he wasn’t present for the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that Enders, Robbins, and Weller
made.
“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to
overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.” This responsibility bias is a major
source of failed collaborations. Professional relationships disintegrate when entrepreneurs, inventors,
investors, and executives feel that their partners are not giving them the credit they deserve, or doing
their fair share.
In Hollywood, between 1993 and 1997 alone, more than four hundred screenplays—roughly a
third of all submitted—went to credit arbitration. If you’re a taker, your driving motivation is to make
sure you get more than you give, which means you’re carefully counting every contribution that you
make. It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your
colleagues contribute.
George Meyer was able to overcome the responsibility bias. The Simpsons has contributed many
words to the English lexicon, the most famous being Homer’s d’oh! response to an event that causes