Egocentric bias

Biological Parallel

Every organism experiences reality exclusively through its own sensory apparatus—a bacterium detects only chemical gradients at its membrane, a bat perceives the world through sonar returns. Natural selection optimizes for individual fitness, making egocentrism the biological default: you can't pass on genes by accurately modeling others' perspectives, but you can by protecting your own interests. Human egocentric bias—overweighting our contributions, assuming others share our knowledge—is this ancestral constraint persisting in social contexts where theory of mind evolved too slowly to override self-referential processing.