"Why else would they be like that?"

Here's the question the reading always wins. If it's not about me, what is it about? Your partner was fine this morning. Your manager usually writes more. Something changed, and the only thing you can see that changed is you.

Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone, in a 1995 review, described what psychologists call the correspondence bias, which is the tendency to explain a person's behaviour by their character or their intentions when the situation they're in explains it perfectly well. It's one of the most reliable findings in the field, and the review set out four separate mechanisms that produce it. The one I'd ask you to notice is the first, which is simply not being aware of the situation. You can see the behaviour. You can't see what produced it. So you explain it with what you can see, which is a person, and what you know about that person's relation to you, which is that they're your manager, or your partner, and you sent a report, or changed a plan.

What you can't see is the day behind it. Lisa Story and Rena Repetti, in 2006, had forty-three couples keep diaries for five working days, recording what happened at work and how they behaved at home that evening. On days when either partner had had difficult interactions with people at work, they were angrier and more withdrawn with their spouse that evening. For the wives, a heavy workload did the same. The researchers tested what carried the effect and found it was mood. A bad day made a bad mood, and the bad mood came home and became silence at dinner. Forty-three couples is a small sample, and the study is about ordinary working couples rather than a general law. But it's a direct answer to the question at the top of this chapter. Why else would they be like that? Because of something that happened at work, which you didn't see, and which produced exactly the behaviour you're reading as being about you.

That's what the other account usually is. Not an exotic explanation. The day behind it. Your manager's two lines were written at ten past two between a meeting that ran over and another that was about to start, and the report didn't come into it. Your partner had a conversation at eleven with someone who was unpleasant, and carried it home, and the bins never crossed their mind.

Chapter 19 is about writing that account on purpose, because the research says you won't reach it by reflex. The reflex stops at the first person in view, and the first person in view is you.