All of that said, I think a big reason people think their own work dominates that of others is because they have different values from other people.

The situation is blurred by the fact that people are motivated to believe that the work that they're doing fulfills their values. For an extreme but vivid case, consider participants in a genocide. It's very hard to imagine that massacring a population reflects their fundamental values, but my impression is that such people often believe that they're doing the "right" thing in some moral sense.

I worry that this might have (much more mild!) incarnations within the EA community.