It's a Thursday afternoon, and I'm on a video call with an executive I'll call Marcus, explaining what's wrong with a peer of his I'll call Dev.
Dev was quiet in a leadership meeting, then at 11 p.m. emailed four people from that meeting every objection he hadn't raised in the room. Marcus has been thinking about this for months. His theory: Dev is building a paper trail because he wants Marcus's job, "playing a longer game than the rest of us."
So I ask, "Have you asked him about it?"
After a long pause, Marcus replies, "Asked him what, exactly?"
I wrote that exchange down afterward, pleased with myself. Then I drove home stewing about a colleague who takes four days to answer anything I send him. I had decided this was proof that he doesn't take my work seriously. Everybody keeps a file like that, built on little to no evidence.
When other people do something, we blame their character: you walk too slowly on a crowded sidewalk because you're oblivious. When we do the same thing, we blame circumstance: I walk slowly because I'm contemplative.
To Marcus, Dev sends a late email because he is political. Marcus sends one because the day got away from him, and he wanted to be thorough. We are gracious with ourselves and brutal with others.
When belief builds its own evidence
In 1971, psychologists Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett named this the actor-observer asymmetry: other people are what they do, while we are products of our circumstances. The idea was widely cited until researcher Bertram Malle pooled 173 studies and found that, on average, it mostly does not hold, except for behavior we dislike. We reach for explanations about someone's character specifically when that person has annoyed us. The bias therefore lands hardest on people we have already decided we dislike. We may understand them least accurately because we look mainly for evidence that confirms our suspicions.
A belief about someone else builds its own evidence, much as a belief about yourself does, except that you file evidence without letting the other side make its case. It is a poor legal process and a good way to be right without being honest.
Marcus stopped including Dev in early conversations. Why include someone who was building a case against him? Dev then learned about decisions after they were made and began raising objections in writing at night because it was the only channel left. Every email made Marcus more certain, expanding a file that his own behavior had helped create.
Real observations, once filed, are rarely revised. Without scrutiny, a one-time impression keeps making live decisions about a person who may have changed or may never have matched the story in the first place.
"He's threatened by me." "She doesn't respect my time." "He's coasting, and everyone can see it but leadership." We often carry such sentences as unquestioned facts. Looking again allows us to question them and build a second explanation: perhaps the person is competent, reasonable, and working under pressures we cannot see.
Is that explanation true? I have no idea. But both the negative and generous versions are inventions when we are missing information. So we need to look for something different.
Conversational receptiveness
Maybe Dev was once picked apart in a meeting. Maybe he is protecting a team that was cut last year, so he decided everything important should go in writing. I do not know whether either possibility is true, and neither does Marcus. That is the point.
Here is the useful part: you can ask. Marcus could say to Dev, "I've noticed the objections tend to show up in email at night, and I'd rather hear them in the room. What makes it easier to raise them afterward?"
Then listen. Researchers Mike Yeomans and Julia Minson have studied how disagreement can become productive. They call the approach conversational receptiveness: restate the other person's position before offering your own, ask "Here's what I'm hearing. What am I missing?" and soften your certainty. Done well, this can reveal the real reason and provide evidence against the story you built.
In my experience, the real reason is usually smaller than my theory: a brutal quarter, something difficult at home, or, more often than I would like, something I contributed to the situation myself, such as a message I never flagged or an irritable reply.
You probably have someone you have already decided about, based on evidence you stopped updating long ago. You might be wrong about that person, too.