You Are Wiser About Other People's Problems Than Your Own

Picture a product manager who hears a rival's announcement and sees the mistake instantly. The rival is chasing big corporate customers too early, with a costly feature for buyers who will not pay off for three years.

Now picture the same manager six months later, when her own team proposes the same kind of costly feature for the same kind of distant payoff, and no one in the room sees the parallel. The example is hypothetical, but the pattern is familiar.

That blind spot has a name. Igor Grossmann, who researches psychology at the University of Waterloo, and Ethan Kross, his coauthor on a 2014 paper, called it Solomon's Paradox, after the biblical king famed for wise counsel to others and poor choices in his own life.

In experiments with 693 volunteers working through conflicts in close relationships, people were consistently wiser about someone else's trouble than their own. They were more likely to admit what they did not know, to consider multiple perspectives, to expect that things could change, and to leave room for compromise.

The explanation is perspective, not intelligence. Reasoning about yourself tends to be focused on yourself, emotionally charged and narrow, and pushed by motivated reasoning, a pull to reach conclusions that protect your past decisions and commitments. Reasoning about someone else is naturally more distanced, cooler and wider, and better able to hold competing interpretations at once. The likely reason she sees the rival clearly is that she has no stake in the rival's success.

The most useful part is that the gap can be closed. When participants were told to view their own difficulty from an outsider's vantage point, as though it had happened to a stranger, their reasoning became indistinguishable from how wisely they judged others. One approach suggested by this finding is for a team to ask what it would think if another team made this decision, and to take any difference seriously.