Why You Are Kinder to Your Friends Than to Yourself
The gap between the two voices is real and it has been measured, though what got measured is not the thing you can feel, and the popular explanation for it does not survive checking
#psychology #selfcompassion
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People took the same responsibility for what had gone wrong. What changed was how much it cost them to look at it.
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Take the thing that went wrong this week and hand it to somebody else.
Say it belongs to your closest friend now, and they have rung you about it at half past nine on a Tuesday. You will tell them it was a rough week. You will say anyone would have let it slide. You will ask what would help.
None of those sentences were available to you at seven that morning, when the facts were identical and they were yours.
The object has not moved. Only the frame around it has.
Researchers have a name for the measured version of this. Solomon's paradox, after the king whose judgement was famous in public and poor at home. Grossmann and Kross, three experiments, 693 people, 2014. People reasoned more wisely about somebody else's conflict than their own, and asking them to view their own as an outside observer would closed the gap entirely.
Worth being straight about what that shows. It shows people reason less well about themselves. It does not show they are harsher. Nobody has run the study that would settle the harshness question, and writing that implies otherwise is describing research that does not exist.
The fear is always the same. That kindness is permission.
In four experiments in 2012, tested against a self-esteem boost rather than against nothing, people made kinder to themselves after failing a first test spent longer studying for a harder second one. In 2007, people took their own part in what went wrong just as fully, and were less flattened by doing it.
Standards and self-attack travel together. They are not the same thing, and they come apart.
The Why We Project.
Link in bio: thewhyweproject.com/articles/kinder-to-friends-than-yourself
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You would never say to a friend what you say to yourself at seven in the morning. There is research on the gap, and it is narrower than the version you have read.
What has actually been measured is the reasoning. Grossmann and Kross, 2014, three experiments with 693 people: we think more wisely about a friend's problem than our own, and asking people to view their own trouble as an outside observer would closes the gap. Nobody has run the study on harshness, so anyone who tells you they have is describing research that does not exist.
The useful bit is the answer to the fear. Made kinder to themselves after failing a test, people studied longer for the next one, not less. Kindness did not hand out permission.
https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/kinder-to-friends-than-yourself
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THE WHY WE PROJECT · WHY WE CARE · ARTICLE 17
By The Why We Project · House byline
Key takeaways
- The measured gap is in reasoning rather than in tone. Grossmann and Kross ran three experiments with 693 people in 2014 and found that the same person reasons more wisely about a friend's relationship conflict than about their own, and that asking people to view their own trouble as an outside observer would closes the gap entirely.
- The explanation everyone gives for this collapsed in 2006. Bertram Malle pooled 173 published studies of the actor-observer asymmetry, the textbook idea that we blame circumstance for our own behaviour and character for everybody else's, and found the effect essentially absent on average.
- Kindness is not permission. In four experiments against self-esteem and distraction controls, Breines and Chen found people studied longer after failing; Leary found they took the same responsibility for what went wrong and suffered less doing it; and Powers and colleagues found across five studies that self-criticism went with worse goal progress while high personal standards on their own went with better.
- No clean experiment exists comparing how harshly a person judges themselves against how harshly they judge a friend in the identical situation. Writing that implies one does is describing a study nobody has run.
- Kristin Neff's self-compassion questionnaire is under a serious and unresolved methodological objection from Peter Muris, whose point is that reverse-scoring self-criticism builds the answer into the instrument. The case for kinder self-talk does not depend on the questionnaire.
Take the thing that went wrong this week and hand it to your closest friend. The same missed deadline. The same message left unanswered for eleven days. They ring you about it at half past nine on a Tuesday night, and you tell them it was a rough week, that anyone would have let it slide, and you ask what would help.
None of those sentences were available to you at seven that morning, when the facts were identical and they were yours. The object has not moved. Only the frame around it has.
So the verdict first. The gap between the two versions is real and it has been measured, but what got measured is how well people think, not how kindly they speak. What follows is that measurement, then a popular explanation for it that fell apart when somebody checked, and then a much better body of work on what changes when people alter how they speak to themselves. The last of those is where the usable answer sits.