Actor-observer bias (asymmetry)

Biological Parallel

When a vervet monkey gives a false alarm, it remembers the ambiguous shadow that triggered the call (external cause). But when a troop-mate false-alarms, the group has no access to what they saw—only the behavior—so they infer unreliability (internal flaw). This actor-observer asymmetry is structurally inevitable: organisms have direct access to their own sensory evidence but must reverse-engineer others' mental states from actions. The bias persists because self-serving narratives preserve status. In organizations, the same asymmetry produces systematic blame misallocation.