The Costs and Benefits of Undoing Egocentric Responsibility Assessments in Groups

Abstract

Individuals working in groups often egocentrically believe they have contributed more of the total work than is logically possible. Actively considering others' contributions effectively reduces these egocentric assessments, but this research suggests that undoing egocentric biases in groups may have some unexpected costs. Four experiments demonstrate that members who contributed much to the group outcome are actually less satisfied and less interested in future collaborations after considering others' contributions compared with those who contributed little. This was especially true in cooperative groups. Egocentric biases in responsibility allocation can create conflict, but this research suggests that undoing these biases can have some unfortunate consequences. Some members who look beyond their own perspective may not like what they see.

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INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES
The Costs and Benefits of Undoing Egocentric Responsibility Assessments
in Groups
Eugene M. Caruso
Harvard University Nicholas Epley
University of Chicago
Max H. Bazerman
Harvard Business School
Individuals working in groups often egocentrically believe they have contributed more of the total work
than is logically possible. Actively considering others’ contributions effectively reduces these egocentric
assessments, but this research suggests that undoing egocentric biases in groups may have some
unexpected costs. Four experiments demonstrate that members who contributed much to the group
outcome are actually less satisfied and less interested in future collaborations after considering others’
contributions compared with those who contributed little. This was especially true in cooperative groups.
Egocentric biases in responsibility allocation can create conflict, but this research suggests that undoing
these biases can have some unfortunate consequences. Some members who look beyond their own
perspective may not like what they see.
Keywords: judgment and decision making, egocentrism, perspective taking, heuristics, biases
Banting and Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine for
the discovery of insulin. Banting, so outraged at the credit given to
Macleod, boycotted the ceremony in Stockholm and awarded half
of his own prize money to a lab coworker. Macleod, who oversaw
Banting’s experiments as director of the laboratory, conveniently
failed to mention Banting in speeches about the research (Harris,
1946). Contrast this animosity to the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics
awarded to Daniel Kahneman, whose late collaborator and close
friend Amos Tversky was ineligible to receive the distinction post-
humously. Consistent with the collaborative nature of their relation-
ship, Kahneman’s opening line in his award address emphasized the
critical importance of Tversky’s efforts in their research together—a
sentiment he has stressed many times before and since.
Unfortunately, research suggests that people too often claim
credit like Banting and Macleod, rather than like Kahneman and
Tversky. Indeed, people are notorious for claiming more respon-
sibility in collective endeavors than they objectively deserve. In
the classic demonstration (M. Ross & Sicoly, 1979), for example,
married couples were asked to assess their responsibility for a
variety of household activities, such as preparing breakfast, shop-
ping, and making important decisions. When summed together,
self-allocated responsibility exceeded 100%, indicating that at
least one member of the couple was—perhaps sorely—mistaken.
Similar results have been observed across domains as diverse as
fund-raising (Zander, 1971), academics (M. Ross & Sicoly, 1979),
and athletics (Brawley, 1984; Forsyth & Schlenker, 1977), just to
name a few (for a review, see Leary & Forsyth, 1987).
Such egocentric biases in responsibility allocations tend to oc-
cur, at least in part, because people focus too much on their own
contributions and too little—if at all—on others’ contributions. As
the opening example suggests, failing to credit others’ contribu-
tions by egocentrically focusing on one’s own can create consid-
erable conflict among group members, even if they are not dis-
agreeing about responsibility for a Nobel Prize (Babcock &
Loewenstein, 1997; Forsyth, Berger, & Mitchell, 1981; Forsyth &
Mitchell, 1979). These egocentric biases have been cited as one of
the key instigators of dissatisfaction and conflict in groups (Baz-
erman & Neale, 1982; Neale & Bazerman, 1983; L. L. Thompson
& Loewenstein, 1992). Reducing such egocentric biases by lead-
ing people to consider their collaborators’ contributions would
therefore seem to be a simple strategy for minimizing the unhap-
piness, dissatisfaction, and conflict they produce.
Eugene M. Caruso, Department of Psychology, Harvard University;
Nicholas Epley, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; Max
H. Bazerman, Harvard Business School.
This research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from
the National Science Foundation to Eugene M. Caruso and by National
Science Foundation Grant SES0241544 and a James S. Kemper Founda-
tion Faculty Research Fund grant to Nicholas Epley. We thank Tara
Abbatello, Dolly Chugh, Sean Darling-Hammond, Angela Kim, Sarah
Murphy, Kristian Myrseth, Heather Omoregie, Dobromir Rahnev, Aram
Seo, and Erin Rapien Whitchurch for assistance conducting these experi-
ments.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nicholas
Epley, University of Chicago, 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago,
IL 60637. E-mail: ecaruso@fas.harvard.edu (Eugene M. Caruso),
epley@chicagogsb.edu (Nicholas Epley), or mbazerman@hbs.edu (Max
H. Bazerman).
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006, Vol. 91, No. 5, 857–871
Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 0022-3514/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.857
857
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