Snap Shot
- The question: Do people who took part in a shared event remember their own role in it differently from the way others remember it, and how should that affect the evaluation of competing accounts?
- What the research shows: People recall their own contributions to joint activities more readily than others’ contributions and, as a result, tend to claim more responsibility than their partners would give them, often for bad outcomes as well as good ones. People also overestimate how much others noticed their actions and how apparent their thoughts and feelings were, and they find it hard to set aside what they know when judging what others knew. Memory for actions a person actually performed is generally better than for actions only imagined or observed; one small, unreplicated study (N = 30) found it hard to erase.
- What it does not show: Egocentric bias is a group-level tendency, measured mostly in estimates of contribution and in laboratory judgments, not in memory for contested criminal acts. It does not show that any participant’s account is false or insincere, and it cannot tell a factfinder which of two conflicting accounts is accurate.
- The law: Expert testimony on the bias must satisfy Rule 702 and, in courts-martial, Houser; Arizona permits general memory testimony (Chapple, Nordstrom) but no expert may opine that a particular witness is or is not truthful (Lindsey).
- Issues for each side: Prosecutors can explain why honest participants give divergent accounts without either lying, but should not treat a complainant’s or cooperating witness’s allocation of roles as an objective record; defense counsel can show why one participant’s account of who did what needs corroboration, but the same bias applies to the accused.
Two people who took part in the same event often remember it differently, and each may be confident. Spouses disagree about who does more of the household work, co-workers disagree about who carried a project or caused a failure, and people involved in a fight, an accident, or a group encounter give accounts that place their own conduct at the center. Egocentric bias is the general name for the tendency to remember and judge shared events from the vantage point of the self: one’s own actions, thoughts, and knowledge are experienced directly and are therefore more available to memory and judgment than the actions, thoughts, and knowledge of others.
The bias reaches court whenever a case turns on competing accounts of a shared event by people who took part in it, including complainants, accused persons, co-accused, cooperating witnesses, and co-workers. Egocentric bias is not lying. It is a normal feature of how memory and judgment are organized around the self, and it operates in honest witnesses on every side.
This paper describes the research on overestimating one’s own responsibility, related egocentric effects in social judgment (the spotlight effect, the illusion of transparency, and the curse of knowledge), memory for one’s own role in events, and accounts from co-workers and from events with several participants, followed by the limits of the evidence and the governing law. Two related topics have their own papers: The Self-Reference Effect (why self-relevant information is remembered well) and The Self-Serving Bias (the motivated tendency to take credit for success and deflect blame for failure).
Overestimating One’s Own Share: Ross and Sicoly
The classic studies were reported by Ross and Sicoly (1979). In five experiments with married couples, intercollegiate basketball players, and discussion and laboratory groups, participants estimated their own share of responsibility for joint activities and outcomes. Spouses, asked separately how much each contributed to household activities, tended to give estimates that together exceeded 100%, and each recalled more examples of his or her own contributions than of the spouse’s. Participants also recalled their own statements in a discussion more accurately than others’ statements. The bias appeared for undesirable activities, such as causing arguments, as well as desirable ones, which suggested that it was not simply self-flattery, although it was weaker, and still present, when the group’s product was evaluated negatively, which suggested that motivation plays some part. Ross and Sicoly attributed the effect mainly to availability: a person’s own contributions are easier to bring to mind, so they weigh more heavily when the person reconstructs who did what. Consistent with that account, when a partner’s contributions were made easier to bring to mind, participants assigned the partner more responsibility for joint decisions.
Later work confirmed and extended the finding. In field studies of academic co-authors and business-school study groups, and in two experiments that manipulated group size, the amount of responsibility people claimed rose as groups grew larger, because larger groups contain more contributions by others to overlook; asking members to consider the other members’ contributions explicitly reduced the overclaiming (Schroeder et al., 2016). The correction has costs: in four experiments, members who had contributed a great deal became less satisfied with their group after considering what others had done (Caruso et al., 2006). Prompting a person to think about others’ roles changes the person’s estimate of his or her own, so the framing of a question can influence the answer.
The Self as Anchor: Spotlight, Transparency, and the Curse of Knowledge
People also overestimate how much others notice them. In the original spotlight studies, students who wore a potentially embarrassing T-shirt into a room overestimated how many observers would be able to recall what was on the shirt, and participants in group discussions overestimated how prominent their own comments had been to the other members (Gilovich et al., 2000). People also overestimate how apparent their internal states are to others, an effect called the illusion of transparency: participants who tried to conceal that they were lying, or to hide their reaction to an unpleasant-tasting drink, overestimated how readily observers would detect it (Gilovich et al., 1998). In both lines of research, people appear to anchor on their own vivid experience and then adjust insufficiently for the perspective of others (Epley et al., 2004).
The curse of knowledge is the related difficulty of setting aside what one knows when judging what another person knew or would have known. Experimental participants who held private information about a company’s earnings failed to discount that information when predicting how uninformed traders would value the company, even when accuracy was rewarded (Camerer et al., 1989), and adults who knew where an object had been moved overestimated the likelihood that another person, who had not seen the move, would look for it there (Birch & Bloom, 2007). The curse of knowledge is close kin to hindsight bias, which has its own paper. Egocentric standards also shape judgments of fairness: people judged an overpayment to themselves as fairer than the same overpayment to another person, a pattern that weakened when participants were made self-aware (Greenberg, 1983).
A participant in an encounter may sincerely believe that his or her intentions, discomfort, or reluctance were obvious to the other person, and may judge what the other person knew from what he or she knew. The research applies to every party. A complainant may overestimate how clearly distress was communicated, and an accused may overestimate how clearly benign intent was communicated or assume that the other person understood the situation as the accused did. The research describes a tendency to overestimate transparency; it does not show what the other person actually perceived on a given occasion.
Memory for One’s Own Role in Events
The self is a central organizing structure for autobiographical memory. Greenwald (1980) described the self as a historian that tends to place itself at the center of past events and may revise the record in its own favor, among other distortions, although the research also shows that memory for one’s own actions is generally strong, and Schacter and colleagues place self-related distortion within the memory “sin” of bias, in which current knowledge, beliefs, and goals shape what is remembered (Schacter et al., 2003). A recent review of the self-memory system describes three forms of bias that are closely tied to the self (consistency, self-enhancing, and positivity biases), and emphasizes that these biases can produce inaccuracy but also serve adaptive functions (Schacter et al., 2024).
Self-centered memory is not the same as weak memory. Actions a person actually performs are generally remembered better than actions the person only read about, watched, or imagined (see The Self-Reference Effect). In one small experiment (N = 30), participants who were instructed to falsely deny actions they had performed did not later come to believe they had only imagined them, while about half of those instructed to falsely claim actions they had only imagined later reported that they had performed them (Bücken et al., 2023). This was one small study (N = 30), not yet replicated so far as identified here, and it used simple laboratory actions, but it tentatively suggests that memory for one’s own conduct can be durable and that the greater risk may lie in adopting suggested actions; one study of this size cannot support a conclusion about any particular person.
Egocentric source errors also occur. In research with young children who completed tasks jointly with an adult, children later tended to claim some of the adult’s actions as their own (Foley et al., 1993). The finding concerns preschool children in collaborative laboratory tasks and identifies a direction of error relevant when a child describes who did what in a joint activity; it does not establish how often such errors occur in children’s accounts of real events (see Suggestibility of Children’s Memory).
Shared Events: Co-Workers, Groups, and Multiple Participants
The responsibility research translates most directly to workplace and unit settings. When an investigation asks co-workers, crew members, or members of a military unit who performed a duty, who gave an instruction, or who was responsible for a failure, egocentric bias predicts that each person will recall his or her own actions more fully than those of others and will tend to assign himself or herself a larger share of the activity than others would. Because the effect appears for negative as well as positive contributions, it does not necessarily point toward self-exoneration; a conscientious person may sincerely overstate his or her part in a failure. The direction of the error depends in part on motivation, which is the subject of The Self-Serving Bias.
Events with several participants, including fights involving several people and offenses alleged against more than one accused, present a related problem. Each participant’s own actions are the most available to that participant, and others’ actions, which may have occurred simultaneously or out of view, are less available. The research predicts that participants will differ in how they attribute particular acts and that their accounts will each be organized around their own conduct. It does not predict the direction of any particular discrepancy, and the egocentric-bias research has not tested accounts of contested criminal events involving several actors. Where any participant, whether a co-accused, a cooperating witness, a complainant, or the accused, has an incentive to shift responsibility, deliberate misstatement is a separate question that memory research does not answer. Reconstruction of a multi-participant event depends on separate interviews conducted before participants compare accounts, on contemporaneous records such as messages, logs, and video, and on accounts from people who did not take part.
Limits of the Evidence
Most egocentric-bias research measures estimates of contribution, judgments of fairness, or predictions about what others noticed or knew, rather than the accuracy of memory for specific acts. Much of it uses students, couples, or work groups in low-stakes settings, and the foundational studies are more than four decades old, although later field and laboratory work has extended the core finding (Schroeder et al., 2016). Effects are group averages that vary across individuals. The research shows that the self is a reference point that distorts judgment in predictable directions; it cannot show that a particular witness’s account of a particular event is distorted, or by how much. It also does not distinguish egocentric memory from deliberate shading by a person with a stake in the outcome, which is a credibility question.
The research also supports reliability in important respects. People generally remember their own actions well, and a divergence between two participants’ accounts can result from two honest vantage points and is not, by itself, evidence that either account is fabricated; other evidence may bear on that question.
Questions to Ask About This Research
When Ross and Sicoly (1979) is cited, counsel should ask what exactly was measured: estimates of the share of responsibility for joint activities by couples, athletes, and discussion groups, not the accuracy of memory for specific acts in a contested event. When the group-size findings of Schroeder et al. (2016) are offered, counsel should ask whether the setting resembles this case and whether the witnesses were asked to consider others’ roles, because that prompt alone changed the estimates. When the illusion of transparency or the curse of knowledge is used to explain a party’s belief about what the other person perceived or knew, counsel should ask whether the conclusion follows for this person, because those laboratory studies show average overestimation, not what was communicated in a given encounter. In every case counsel should ask whether the expert is describing a general tendency or offering an opinion about a particular witness, which the research cannot support. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.
Egocentric Bias and the Law
Federal and Military Standards
Expert testimony about memory and judgment is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, as amended December 1, 2023, under which the proponent must show the court that it is more likely than not that the rule’s requirements are met, including that the opinion reflects a reliable application of reliable principles and methods to the facts. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) assigned the trial judge a gatekeeping role, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999) extended that obligation to all expert testimony, including testimony based on technical or other specialized knowledge. In courts-martial, Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule, and the 2023 amendment became part of the military rule in 2025 through Military Rule of Evidence 1102 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025); practitioners should confirm the current text. Military judges evaluate proffered expert testimony under the six factors of United States v. Houser (1993).
Arizona
Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the federal formulation and the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012, and was amended effective January 1, 2024, to conform to the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). State v. Chapple (1983) is Arizona’s leading case on expert testimony concerning the reliability of memory and eyewitness accounts; excluding the expert was an abuse of discretion on its facts, while admission generally remains within the trial court’s discretion, and State v. Nordstrom (2001) approved limiting such an expert to general factors without opinions on the accuracy of a particular witness. Experts may not opine on whether a particular witness is telling the truth (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475), so testimony about egocentric bias should describe tendencies rather than vouch for or against a complainant’s, a co-participant’s, or a defendant’s account.
Special Issues in Legal Practice
The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.
Special Issues for Prosecutors
The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. Honest participants in a shared event commonly give accounts that differ in who did what, and that divergence can result from ordinary memory processes rather than deception, so a discrepancy between a complainant’s account and another witness’s account is not by itself evidence that the complainant is untruthful; the same is true of an accused’s account that differs from another’s, and other evidence may bear on whether either account is accurate. Memory for actions a person actually performed is generally better than memory for actions only imagined or observed; the experiment on falsely denying performed actions was one small study (N = 30) and has not yet been replicated, so far as identified here. An accused’s sincere belief that his or her intentions were obvious, or that the other person understood the situation the same way, is a recognized tendency to overestimate transparency, not proof of what the other person perceived. Prosecutors are well positioned to obtain separate, early statements from each participant and contemporaneous records that do not depend on any one vantage point.
The research also counsels caution. The same bias operates on complainants, cooperating witnesses, and co-workers who testify for the government, whose accounts are organized around their own conduct and may understate or overstate their own part. A cooperating co-participant’s allocation of roles in a multi-participant event should not be presented as an objective record, both because of egocentric memory and because of incentives that memory research does not address. Testimony that describes egocentric bias as operating only on the accused misstates the research.
Special Issues for Defense
The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. People recall their own contributions more readily than others’ and tend to claim a larger share of joint activity than others would give them; in an event with several participants, each person’s account is organized around his or her own conduct, and acts by others are less available. An account of who did what in a group setting therefore warrants comparison with separate statements, records, and disinterested witnesses, and the timing and framing of questions can matter, because prompting a person to consider others’ roles changes the person’s estimate of his or her own. The same reasoning protects the accused: a discrepancy between the accused’s account and a complainant’s or co-participant’s account can result from different vantage points and is not by itself evidence that the accused is untruthful.
The research also counsels caution about the limits that apply to the defense. Egocentric bias does not show that a complainant’s or co-participant’s account is false or insincere, and an expert may not tell the factfinder that it is. The research is largely drawn from estimates of contribution and laboratory judgments, not memory for contested criminal events, and it does not predict the direction of any particular discrepancy. The accused’s own account is subject to the same bias, including the tendency to overestimate how clearly his or her intentions were conveyed and to judge what others knew from what he or she knew.
This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.
References
Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2007). The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs. Psychological Science, 18(5), 382–386. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01909.x
Bücken, C. A., Otgaar, H., Mangiulli, I., Ramakers, N., & Merckelbach, H. (2023). Can false denials turn fact into fiction? The effect of false denials on memory for self-performed actions. Psychological Research, 87(3), 816–825. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01695-7
Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651
Caruso, E. M., Epley, N., & Bazerman, M. H. (2006). The costs and benefits of undoing egocentric responsibility assessments in groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 857–871. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.857
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Foley, M. A., Ratner, H. H., & Passalacqua, C. (1993). Appropriating the actions of another: Implications for children’s memory and learning. Cognitive Development, 8(4), 373–401. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(05)80001-2
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Legal Authorities
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).
State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).
State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).
State v. Nordstrom, 200 Ariz. 229, 25 P.3d 717 (2001).
United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).
Fed. R. Evid. 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 1102.
Ariz. R. Evid. 702.
Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).
Related topic papers: The Self-Serving Bias · The Self-Reference Effect · Hindsight Bias · Autobiographical Memory · Reconstruction and Recall · Suggestibility of Children’s Memory