Egocentric Bias

Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly first documented the underlying phenomenon in their 1979 study "Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution," showing that people systematically overestimated their own contribution to shared work. The following year, psychologist Anthony Greenwald at Ohio State University coined the term "egocentric bias" in a 1980 paper, characterizing the ego as a "totalitarian" information system that rewrites personal history to maintain a favorable self-image — a quality he compared to the self-serving propaganda of authoritarian regimes.