Other People's Outcomes Reflect on Us

Other people’s outcomes reflect on us

We all want to feel good about ourselves in the moment, even if it’s at the expense of our long-term goals. Just as with motivated reasoning and self-serving bias, blaming others for their bad results and failing to give them credit for their good ones is under the influence of ego. Taking credit for a win lifts our personal narrative. So too does knocking down a peer by finding them at fault for a loss. That’s schadenfreude: deriving pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. Schadenfreude is basically the opposite of compassion.

Ideally, our happiness would depend on how things turn out for us regardless of how things turn out for anyone else. Yet, on a fundamental level, fielding someone’s bad outcome as their fault feels good to us. On a fundamental level, fielding someone’s good outcome as luck helps our narrative along.

This outcome fielding follows a logical pattern in zero-sum games like poker. When I am competing head-to-head in a poker hand, I must follow this fielding pattern to square my self-serving interpretation of my own outcomes with the outcomes of my opponent. If I win a hand in poker, my opponent loses. If I lose a hand in poker, my opponent wins. Wins and losses are symmetrical. If I field my win as having to do with my skillful play, then my opponent in the hand must have lost because of their less skillful play. Likewise, if I field my loss as having to do with luck, then my opponent must have won due to luck as well. Any other interpretation would create cognitive dissonance.

Thinking about it this way, we see that the way we field other people’s outcomes is just part of self-serving bias. Viewed through this lens, the pattern begins to make sense.

But this comparison of our results to others isn’t confined to zero-sum games where one player directly loses to the other (or where one lawyer loses to opposing counsel, or where one salesperson loses a sale to a competitor, etc.). We are really in competition for resources with everyone. Our genes are competitive. As Richard Dawkins points out, natural selection proceeds by competition among the phenotypes of genes so we literally evolved to compete, a drive that allowed our species to survive. Engaging the world through the lens of competition is deeply embedded in our animal brains. It’s not enough to boost our self-image solely by our own successes. If someone we view as a peer is winning, we feel like we’re losing by comparison. We benchmark ourselves to them. If their kids are doing better in school than ours, what are we doing wrong with our kids? If their company is in the news because it is about to go public, what’s wrong with us that we’re just inching forward in our work?

We think we know the ingredients for happiness. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and popular author on the subject of happiness, summarized several reviews of the literature on the elements we commonly consider: “a comfortable income, robust health, a supportive marriage, and lack of tragedy or trauma.” Lyubomirsky noted, however, that “the general conclusion from almost a century of research on the determinants of well-being is that objective circumstances, demographic variables, and life events are correlated with happiness less strongly than intuition and everyday experience tell us they ought to be. By several estimates, all of these variables put together account for no more than 8% to 15% of the variance in happiness.” What accounts for most of the variance in happiness is how we’re doing comparatively. (The breadth and depth of all that research on happiness and its implications is important, but it’s beyond what we need to understand our issue with sorting others’ outcomes. I encourage you to read Lyubomirsky’s work on the subject, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.)

A consistent example of how we price our own happiness relative to others comes from a version of the party game “Would You Rather . . . ?” When you ask people if they would rather earn $70,000 in 1900 or $70,000 now, a significant number choose 1900. True, the average yearly income in 1900 was about $450. So we’d be doing phenomenally well compared to our peers from 1900. But no amount of money in 1900 could buy Novocain or antibiotics or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a powerful computer we could hold in one hand. About the only thing $70,000 bought in 1900 that it couldn’t buy today was the opportunity to soar above most everyone else. We’d rather lap the field in 1900 with an average life expectancy of only forty-seven years than sit in the middle of the pack now with an average life expectancy of over seventy-six years (and a computer in our palm).

A lot of the way we feel about ourselves comes from how we think we compare with others. This robust and pervasive habit of mind impedes learning. Luckily, habits can be changed, whether the habit is biting your nails or decrying your terrible luck when you lose. By shifting what it is that makes us feel good about ourselves, we can move toward a more rational fielding of outcomes and a more compassionate view of others. We can learn better and be more open-minded if we work toward a positive narrative driven by engagement in truthseeking and striving toward accuracy and objectivity: giving others credit when it’s due, admitting when our decisions could have been better, and acknowledging that almost nothing is black and white.