“You look like the world is against you”, remarked a more mature, and remarkably perceptive colleague one day when I was a (very naive!) postdoc. “It is!”, I replied grumpily, and I truly meant it. But that evening I looked back and rethought. The simple fact that these words have stayed in my mind ever since shows how important they were.
 
We all have occasional days when we feel this way, but in that particular period of my life a number of important things had not gone my way, most of them outside work. Somehow I’d got locked into this unhelpful way of thinking and it was this comment that shook me out of it.
 
All of us have more potential than our progress suggests. We sense it in our bones and look for explanations. Some of these lie within us, and some outside, but because of self-serving bias the outside ones are so much easier to see and more comfortable to think about. So we attribute explanations wrongly, exaggerating the roles of external events in our adversity. This makes us feel ‘better’ in the short-term, but comes at a serious long-term expense.
 
On days when we feel overwhelmed and everything falls apart, it’s hard to stop ourselves looking around for someone to pin ‘fault’ on: the previous user of the equipment we find broken, the administrator who hasn’t dealt with our request yet, the person who trained us but missed out one crucial detail, the reviewer who misunderstood our paper, the senders of our hundred unanswered emails – we have a long list to choose from. 

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​Our chosen scapegoats may not be perfect, but neither are we! We are, after all, the one who tried to cram an unrealistic amount into our day, despite years of evidence that no day ever goes quite to plan! To expect other people to attend to our needs instantly and perfectly, when they may also be overburdened or under the weather is simply unrealistic. And if a reviewer misunderstands our paper, doesn’t this mean some readers might also struggle to follow it? The need for us to clarify the wording is important feedback. But in our mind, it’s their fault, pure and simple!
 
Attribution errors sit alongside misunderstanding of emotions and heuristics in human thinking flaws, and scientists are no different. What roles does this play in making our research lives more difficult than they need to be? How can we get a better grip on reality to avoid this? And how do we avoid going too far the other way, blaming ourselves for everything? 

​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?