"After everything I've been through"

Here's an example. Someone has had a terrible year. There was a redundancy, and then a parent's long illness. One evening their partner asks if they could do the school run on Thursday, and the first thought is "after the year I've had?" That week they're also short with a shop assistant, and they skip a friend's birthday without sending a message. Nobody says anything. They feel, without ever putting it into words, that some slack is owed to them.

The belief is that suffering earns credit, and in part it does. People who are going through a hard time need allowances made, and good friends make them. Nobody expects you at a party the week after a funeral.

The research shows what happens when that feeling spreads beyond the hard time itself. Emily Zitek and colleagues ran three experiments in 2010. In one, some students were asked to recall a time when life had treated them unfairly, and afterwards they were more likely to refuse a small favour than students who'd recalled a time they were bored. In another, people who lost a computer game because of a glitch later asked for a bigger share of some money than people who'd lost fairly. In both cases the link was a sense of being entitled to good outcomes. These were students and the stakes were small. Gabay's group found something similar, in that people who scored high on their questionnaire felt freer to behave badly towards someone who had slighted them.

I don't think the feeling of being owed is wicked. What worries me is who ends up paying. A credit note is only good at the shop that issued it. The people who wronged you aren't around to honour yours, so it tends to get presented to whoever is nearest. That means your partner, your children, your friends and the man on the till, and none of them did it. They'll make allowances for a while. Then they get tired and pull back a little, and that feels like one more wrong.

The second part of this is the high ground. In your account of what happened, you behaved decently and they didn't. That's probably true of the event. The risk is that it spreads into a general sense that having suffered makes you see more clearly and behave better than people who've had it easy. Once that sets in, criticism becomes nearly impossible to hear. Any complaint about you feels like another attack on someone who's been through enough already. You also stop noticing the harm you do. A person can be wronged and can wrong others in the same week. That's true of nearly everybody, and it's true of you and me.

The third part is comparing. Someone tells you about their trouble, and before they've finished you've answered with yours, which is worse. It rarely feels like competing. To you it feels like showing that you understand. To the other person it feels like not being listened to, and over time they stop telling you things.

You might object that you can't pretend to be fine. I'm not asking you to. You need the slack, so ask for it, plainly and in advance. "I'm having a bad week. Could you do the school run on Thursday?" is a request. The other person can say yes to it, and you can thank them. When you take slack without asking, other people pay a cost they never agreed to, and nobody gets thanked.

Two practical things. Listen for the phrase "after everything" in your own thinking, or its cousins, "you'd think that just once" and "the least they could do". When one turns up, look at who's about to be asked to pay, and whether they had anything to do with it.

And try one experiment this week. Ask someone about a difficulty of theirs, and keep listening to the end without mentioning one of your own. It's harder than it sounds.