A few weeks ago, a friend called me in a state of distress. Her partner had made an important decision without consulting her, and she no longer knew how to respond. Within ten minutes, I had a clear analysis of the situation, three well-reasoned options, and a few ideas for the difficult conversation that needed to happen. She thanked me warmly. “You really see things clearly,” she told me.

The next day, I made a poor professional decision—one that was obvious in hindsight—in a roughly similar situation. And it was not the first time.

If you recognize yourself in this scenario, you are not alone. And you are not suffering from unconscious hypocrisy. You are simply a victim of the Solomon paradox.

A phenomenon as old as a legendary king

The name comes from the biblical story of King Solomon. In the Book of Kings, this ruler asks God not for wealth or power, but for wisdom—more specifically, the ability to distinguish good from evil in order to govern his people. He would become one of the most renowned judges of antiquity, capable of resolving seemingly impossible disputes. Yet the same Bible notes that he made disastrous decisions in his own private life, particularly in his political alliances.

Even Solomon, a model of wisdom for others, failed to govern himself.

It was from this contradiction that psychologists Igor Grossmann (University of Waterloo) and Ethan Kross (University of Michigan) drew the name of their concept. In 2014, they published a study in Psychological Science that precisely documented this phenomenon: we reason significantly more wisely when analyzing other people’s problems than when confronting our own.

What the study reveals

In their experiments, Grossmann and Kross asked participants to imagine either their own romantic partner cheating on them or a friend’s partner doing the same. The responses were analyzed according to several classic criteria of wisdom: the ability to acknowledge uncertainty, incorporate the other person’s point of view, consider multiple possible outcomes, and avoid being swept away by the moment.

The result is striking: participants reasoned much more wisely when the problem concerned a friend than when it affected them directly. The gap appeared among both young adults and older people. Contrary to what one might think, age alone was not enough to close it.

In other words, life experience does not automatically protect us from this bias. It is not a matter of maturity. It is a matter of distance.

Why our own lives blind us

When a problem affects us directly, we are, by definition, at the center of the situation. Our emotions are activated, our ego is at stake, and our fears and hopes color every part of the picture. Cognitive psychology calls this first-person immersion: we experience the event from the inside, with no possible detachment.

When we help someone else, we are naturally at a distance. We observe. We have nothing to lose in the matter—or at least not in the same way. This emotional distance frees an analytical ability that we all possess, but that becomes paralyzed as soon as we ourselves are involved.

This is not a character flaw. It is built into the architecture of our social functioning: we are optimized to navigate other people’s problems because doing so requires precision and objectivity. Our own lives, by contrast, are permeated by a constant emotional urgency that short-circuits cool analysis.

The technique that works: talking to yourself in the third person

The good news from Grossmann and Kross’s study is that they also tested a solution. And it is surprisingly simple.

When participants were invited to think about their own problem by referring to themselves in the third person—for example, “What should Marie do in this situation?” rather than “What should I do?”—the wisdom gap almost entirely disappeared. By looking at themselves from the outside, they recovered the same quality of reasoning they showed when advising a friend.

This technique is called self-distancing (self-distancing). It consists of artificially creating the distance we naturally have from other people’s problems. You can talk to yourself in the third person, write about your situation as though you were describing a stranger’s, or simply ask yourself: “If my best friend were going through exactly this, what would I tell them?”

Later research, including work published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022, confirmed and deepened our understanding of these mechanisms by exploring the role of emotional state and self-transcendence in this phenomenon. Distancing does not erase emotions—it temporarily puts them in parentheses to make room for analysis.

The advice we do not dare give ourselves

There is something almost dizzying about this idea: we already carry within us the wisdom we need. We express it whenever someone close asks for our opinion. We put it into practice when a friend feels lost. But as soon as it concerns us, we forget what we know.

It is not because we lack insight. It is because we are too close to ourselves to see clearly.

The next time you find yourself stuck in front of a difficult decision, try this: frame the question as though you were talking about a friend. Use your first name. Describe the situation in the third person. And listen to the answer you give—because it is often the best one you have ever received.

Solomon, for his part, had no one to give him that advice.