It is not only the French existentialists who give voice to our creeping sense that our fellow human beings cannot be relied on as much as we might wish.
L’enfer c’est les autres (Hell, that’s the others), groused Sartre (1944), and this may be a bit thick, but why does it resonate? Psychological science has produced insights that dim our hopes that all will be – or can be – well in the social world. And then, of course, there is daily experience.
Since the days of Gustave Le Bon, another French author, the academic departments dedicated to the study of human nature have shown a strong pessimistic strain (Forgas, 2025). Floyd Allport traced violent crowd behaviour to inclinations residing in the individual; his brother Gordon literally wrote the book on prejudice. Explorations of bounded rationality soon degenerated into a hunt for systematic irrationality (Krueger & Funder, 2003), and when that was not enough, a flood of implicit biases soaked the psychological landscape.
Where there’s a yin, there must be a yang. And so, we observe that the advocates of humanistic psychology, from Maslow to Rogers and from Deci and Seligman, have tirelessly pointed to the positive, positing that humans have the potential to do better. Their message of hope and rugged yes-we-can-ism keeps an industry of counseling, coaching, and self-help afloat.
The work is Sisyphean, however, and Camus (1955/1942) would have understood. The gods punished Sisyphus for his arrogance by making him overconfident in his own powers, condemning him to forever disappoint himself. Then, with Sartre’s No Exit, we are graduating to the view that the biggest disappointments come from other people.
How can contemporary psychological science help make sense of this? What structural and psychological principles must we understand so we can accept reality without despair? We can begin by identifying internal, that is, psychological, and external, that is, ecological, sources of continued disappointment.
Foremost among the psychological principles is the false idea that other people care as much about us as we care about ourselves. A moment’s reflection reveals that this cannot be so. Everyone’s interest in themselves must be strongest. Pure altruists cannot survive in a world where some, if not most, individuals look first after their own interests (Krueger, 2011).
So, we make corrections. We still anchor our estimates of how much others care about us on how much we care about ourselves, and we then adjust downward, but insufficiently so. The net result is that we still overestimate how much others care about us. This process and its outcomes fall into the same family of egocentric reasoning that produces overconfidence, self-enhancement, and consensus bias (i.e., social projection).
A second set of principles comprises wishful thinking and negativity bias. The idea of wishful thinking is self-explanatory. The value placed on an outcome (being loved, respected, treated with compassion) affects its perceived probability (Krizan & Windschitl, 2007). But wishing so does not make it so. What is more, once the behaviours of others have been observed, the negatives stand out and are remembered better than the positives (Baumeister et al., 2001). A disappointment suffered at the hands of a friend is psychologically more powerful than a pleasant surprise.
Negativity bias is strongest in moralised domains. A single negative act taints a person’s character if it evokes moral judgment (e.g., telling a lie), whereas a single act of failure need not erase the perception of a person’s skill or intelligence (Reeder & Brewer, 1979). People disappoint us when they fail to live up to expectations of goodwill and benevolence, not necessarily when they err in the execution of a performance.
Psychological sources of disappointment are easy to describe and understand because they align with our general inclination to search for explanations of others’ behaviour within those others (Jones & Davis, 1965). With a bit of reflection, situational attributions also receive their due (e.g., stress at work made him do it; Gilbert, 2002). But it is structural or ecological constraints that are most difficult to see, and yet, they are powerful.
The main point to realise here is that another person’s behaviour that we observe is but a small sample of what that person does in the course of a day or a lifetime. Behaviour is noisy in the sense that it does not reflect an underlying trait reliably and faithfully. Sometimes, a person behaves more admirably, sometimes they miss the bar. When others behave well, we are motivated to engage with them again; when they behave poorly, we are motivated to walk away.
This pattern, which is perfectly understandable in terms of the basic laws of learning, has a significant implication. When, because of the noisy nature of their behaviour, an otherwise reliable acquaintance behaves poorly and we walk away (perhaps after granting one second chance), we miss the opportunity to see their behavior improve again simply because it regresses back to the acceptable baseline. Our disappointment and our walking away then remain the last impression stored in memory.
We continue to seek out friends with high baselines of good behaviour. But even the finest among these friends are subject to behavioural noise. The higher their baseline is, the more likely it is that any departure from it, due to noise, is negative instead of positive. In other words, the finest friends can only disappoint if behaviour changes. And this we cannot help but notice. We disengage from others who, due to noisiness, behave poorly, and thereby we miss the opportunity to see them improve again. This asymmetry in the samples of behaviour we obtain rather forces the impression that l‘enfer c’est les autres (Prager et al., 2018). Notice the irony: By seeking to find the positive and eliminate the negative, we end up experiencing more negative than positive changes in others’ behaviour.
What to do? Ecological biases, by tilting the information available to us to the negative, are a powerful source of biased impressions and unhappiness. Correcting for these biases requires metacognitive skills, that is, skills designed to manage information before it lodges in the mind. This can be done in principle, but self-help soundbites are not likely to do the trick.
A place to start, perhaps, is to reverse perspective and ask how the noisiness of our own behaviour provides sampling input for others and how it might invite inferences that damage our relationships. Ask not, we shall demand, how others disappoint us; ask how we disappoint others. Can we forgive ourselves for our noisy behaviour?
In his most introspective work, La Chute (The Fall), Albert Camus (1957/1956) – or rather his narrating character – confesses: “I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.” Is this wisdom or despair? Or is it perhaps a bit of both?
While the psychological regularities described here are inescapable, it is worth noting that their emotional impact is moderated by personality. Those with a secure style of attachment suffer less from social disappointment than those with an insecure style. Those with an avoidant style have finessed the game.
I once tried to explain the travails of Sisyphus (forever rolling a huge rock toward a mountain top) to a gym friend. Before I could get to the punchline (that we must – as Camus conjectured – think Sisyphus happy) my friend exclaimed: “He must have been jacked!”
