I’m good, we’re good

​Here’s a particularly perceptive comment that has stuck in my mind, from a fellow cyclist on a group ride one Sunday morning: “Have you noticed the wind is either against you or you’re feeling really good today?”. If a ride feels easy, it’s never because there is a howling tailwind blowing you along, you’ve just miraculously become super-fit. A deep comment indeed for a blurry-eyed Sunday morning!
 
Of course as scientists we would never do this, would we? We would never see a funded grant as a sign that we wrote a good project but question the judgement of the committee if our next grant application is rejected. And if we arrive late for a meeting, we would never blame the traffic that held us up, rather than the fact that we left it too late starting our journey there. Of course not!
 
Self-serving bias is everywhere, and this includes scientists – all of us! We don’t usually see it, at least not in ourselves, because like everyone we have a ‘bias blindspot’. Only ‘other people’ are irrational, not us!  

Self-serving bias has a close cousin: in-group bias. We may tell ourselves our group does better science than our competitors, that our generation has dealt with more hardship than others, that ‘all’ people in other job types (administrators, journal editors, funders, support staff, etc.) are not as committed as we are, or are less reasonable people.
 
As supposedly rational scientists, shouldn’t we make sure we have all the information we need before we form these beliefs? What makes us think we have sufficient knowledge of those other people’s lives, or indeed that we have an objective view of our own life? But every day we find ourselves slipping into these ways of thinking.
 
We are human after all, and these are common thinking errors that occur over and over in human thinking. But here’s the big question: how much anguish do we create for ourselves, and for our colleagues, by thinking this way?

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