Bertram Malle
Bertram Malle is Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, working on how people explain behaviour, on moral psychology and on human-machine interaction. He was born in Austria, took his doctorate at Stanford in 1995, and was at the University of Oregon before Brown. He appears on this site for a negative finding: his 2006 meta-analysis gathered 173 published studies and found that a textbook claim taught for decades is, on average, essentially absent.
Who they are
The claim in question is the actor-observer asymmetry: that people explain their own behaviour by circumstances and other people's by character. You were late because the traffic was bad; they were late because they are careless. Malle pooled the studies that had tested it. Averaged across all of them, the effect sat at roughly nothing.
This site keeps the folklore on file with the person who dismantled it attached, which is the point of the page.
His affiliation was confirmed in the vault on 11 September 2026 against the Brown University Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences record.
Key papers
Malle, B. F. (2006). "The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: a (surprising) meta-analysis", Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 895 to 919. Sole author. One hundred and seventy-three published studies.
Key ideas
He is not saying perspective does not matter. The asymmetry did appear under narrow conditions, and it reversed for positive events, which he reads as a self-serving pattern rather than an actor-observer one. His paper corrects a mechanism. It does not deny that people treat themselves and others differently.
The self-other gap that does survive is a different one. See Solomon's Paradox, on reasoning more wisely about other people's problems than about your own.
The working rule on this site. Nobody here uses the actor-observer asymmetry to explain why people are hard on themselves. Where it appears, it appears as a popular idea that 173 studies did not find.
It belongs to a family. A confidently taught result that thins out when the evidence is pooled is the shape of a great deal of what is carried at The Replication Crisis.
Concepts on this site
The Actor-Observer Asymmetry, held here as an idea the pooled evidence did not support, because of his result
Solomon's Paradox, the self-other effect that survives
The Replication Crisis, the family this result belongs to
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Malle, B. F. (2006). Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 895 to 919. One hundred and seventy-three published studies; average effect sizes ran from minus 0.016 to 0.095, which is close to no difference in either direction.
- Vault record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed against the Brown University departmental record.