The Interpersonal Implications of Stealing the Glory

Abstract

People tend to overestimate their contribution to joint tasks, in part because their own contributions are more memorable than the contributions of their collaborators. We examined some of the interpersonal consequences of this bias. Participants engaged in either a hypothetical (Experiment 2) or real (Experiment 1) cooperative task and learned how their collaborator ostensibly allocated responsibility. We varied how much credit the collaborator took for herself, and also how much credit she gave to the participant, factors confounded in past research. In each experiment, collaborators who stole the glory were seen as less fair, harder to get along with, and less honest than were collaborators who did not. Interestingly, this effect was driven by one's own contribution being underappreciated more than one's collaborator's contribution being overstated. Mediational analyses revealed that the discord could be traced to the attribution of biased responsibility judgments to self-interest on the part of one's collaborator.