Everything You Do is Right Day

What the day is

Everything You Do is Right Day is observed on March 16, directly after its opposite. Where yesterday's entry concerned hindsight, this one concerns the more comfortable bias.

Origin and background

The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute successes to your own ability and failures to circumstances. It is among the most reliably replicated findings in social psychology, and it operates without any awareness of doing so. A promotion reflects competence; a rejection reflects a bad market, a poor interviewer or bad luck. The same person applies the reverse reasoning to others, reading their failures as character and their successes as fortune.

It is not simple vanity. Attributing outcomes this way protects motivation, and people who do it moderately tend to recover from setbacks better than those who attribute everything to their own deficiency. The bias is doing useful work, and the interesting question is not how to eliminate it but where it becomes expensive.

It becomes expensive when it blocks learning, because a failure explained entirely by circumstance produces nothing to change. It also strains relationships, since both parties to a joint effort typically recall contributing more than half of it, and both are sincere. Studies asking couples to estimate their share of household tasks routinely find the totals exceed one hundred percent, for the mundane reason that your own contributions are the ones you witnessed.

There is a group for whom the day is genuinely useful rather than indulgent. People inclined to attribute failure to themselves and success to luck, the reverse pattern, are common, and giving them a day to claim credit is not flattery but correction.

How to take part

• Take credit for something you actually did, out loud.
• Estimate your share of a joint effort, then ask the other person for theirs.
• Find one failure and name the part that was yours.
• Tell somebody who habitually deflects praise exactly what they got right.
• Notice which explanation you reach for with your own results and with other people's.