Social Elevation
Fundamental Attribution Error
Their fault is who they are. Your fault is the situation.
Grounded in the research on the fundamental attribution error
the gist
You explain OTHER people's bad behavior by their character ('he's a jerk') but your OWN by the situation ('I was having a rough day'). Same action, opposite story, depending on whose it is.
the science
Named in social psychology by Lee Ross in 1977. It rides on the actor-observer gap: you feel your own situational pressures from the inside but only see other people from the outside, so you over-blame their personality and under-weight their context.