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aspects of this bias in a groundbreaking paper published in 2001 entitled “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.” 31 The key observation she made was that “People think they know others better than others know them. People think they know themselves better than others know themselves.”
    Pronin and her colleagues conducted very elegant experiments that assessed what people think they know about their close friends, how well roommates believe they know themselves and each other, how revealing people believe their own behaviors are compared to that of their peers, how well people believe that they can know someone after a brief meeting, and how “knowable” they think they are compared to their peers when performing certain types of psychological testing.
    Their experiments clearly confirmed the existence and extent of the illusion of asymmetric insight. Pronin and her colleagues describe this bias as a special case of naïve realism. In other words, we believe we have special insight into the nature of the behavior of others and of ourselves, and that others don’t have such insight. As absurd as that sounds when spelled out, several of Pronin’s fascinating experiments have confirmed that we really do regularly exhibit this form of naïve realism.
    The relevance for people with cravings is that, in my experience, they severely discount other people’s suggestions, because “they couldn’t know or understand me.” As a result, they often trust themselves and discount the suggestions of others, perpetuating the dysfunctional behaviors that either result in or result from cravings. Pronin went on to study how members of groups assess their own group’s bias versus an opposing group’s bias. In chapter 7 , we’ll explore how membership in a group enhances trust and how this can be helpful when dealing with cravings. And in chapter 8 we’ll discuss a technique for addressing this bias called the Johari window.
    To further compound the bias problem, although the evidence is mixed, it does seem that, in general, people tend to attribute successes to themselves and failures to others. Psychologists call this the self-serving bias. This bias can create significant problems for someone who is trying to address cravings. Any of the attribution biases—biases where the credit for something is pointed in the wrong direction—can spell trouble when it comes to addressing cravings, because with all of these behaviors people are sometimes successful in controlling the behavior and sometimes not. If you are unclear why your efforts have succeeded or failed, then any attempt to correct the problem could be unsuccessful. People don’t always show a self-serving bias. The late Thomas “Shelley” Duval and Paul Silvia from the University of Southern California have suggested that success and failure attributions are driven by focusing on yourself, being aware of yourself, and believing that you can improve. 32 According to Duval and Silvia, if a person is self-focused and believes he can improve, then success is attributed internally, and failure is also attributed internally; as a result, the bias is limited. In other words, the person would take credit for successes and accept personal responsibility for failures. If the same person believes he can’t improve, then there is a tendency to attribute failure externally; in other words, to blame others for their failures. This has significant implications for hope, which we’ll discuss in chapter 10 .
    Blind Spot Bias
    Of course, there are hundreds of types of bias, and no one is immune. In fact, one type of bias, often referred to as “blind spot bias” (which is really a form of a broader bias called asymmetry bias), is used to describe people who think of themselves as less biased than others. Some very interesting research from Dr. Joyce Ehrlinger shows that people think they are more likely to exhibit bias in the abstract rather