Hey all,
Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.
Continuing on the theme of cognitive biases, today’s topic is the self-serving bias.
Self-serving bias
What it is: The self-serving bias refers to our tendency to attribute our successes to internal or dispositional factors, like talent or intelligence, while attributing our failures to external or situational factors, like bad luck or an uneven playing field. For instance, if we get the job we interviewed for, then we’re likely to think it was through our own efforts and hard work. Whereas if we don’t get the job, then we’re more likely to blame it on the questions being too hard or the interviewer being biased.
See also: the fundamental attribution error (we attribute other people’s failures to their disposition while we attribute our own failures to the situation).
How its was discovered: In 1969, Streufert and Streufert got participants to play a simulated decision-making game in teams of two. The teams either received feedback that they were succeeding or that they were failing. Participants in succeeding teams were more likely to take ownership of their results than participants in failing teams.
How it works: Early on, it was believed that the self-serving bias arose from a need to preserve our self-esteem. Having healthy levels of self-esteem is important to our functioning, therefore this seemed to make sense.
However, later research favoured a different explanation, which is that the self-serving bias is related to how much reality ligns up with our expectations. So to take the job example from earlier, if the job interview went really well and we got the job, we would attribute our success to dispositional factors as that would be the outcome we expected. However, if we didn’t get the job so the outcome didn’t match our expectations, then we would be more likely to attribute it to situational factors.
Thank you for reading, see you next time!
Sources:
Self-serving bias in the attribution of causality: fact or fiction? (Miller & Ross, 1975)
Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that we all make and that affect our judgement and behaviours. We humans like to believe we’re rational thinkers, but our brains aren’t quite wired that way. Cognitive biases are just one of the ways in which our thinking is flawed, so it’s good to be aware of them.