Social comparison can also make the self-serving bias stronger. This can help protect your self-esteem and keep you from feeling shame or guilt when things don’t turn out. If you tend to feel like outside forces hold greater sway, you might be more likely to blame external factors for your mistakes. If you tend to have more of an external locus of control, you’re more likely to feel that outside forces have a more powerful effect. If you have an internal locus of control, it means that you believe that you have the power to control what happens in your life. Your locus of control refers to whether you believe you have control over the events in your life or whether you feel like your destiny is out of your hands. Your own tendency to make either internal or external attributions can also influence whether you engage in a self-serving bias. It helps to reinforce the idea that people are capable while minimizing feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Blaming external factors for failures is a defense mechanism that protects the ego from negative feelings.īy doing this, people can maintain a positive sense of self. People need to protect their self-esteem and self-image. There are a number of different explanations to describe what causes the self-serving bias: It Protects Self-Esteem When we are the observers in a situation, we attribute other people’s failures to their personal characteristics. We don’t give others this same grace, however. If we are the actor, our attributes are more self-serving-we take credit for the things that go right but cast the blame elsewhere when things go wrong.

The attributions we make depend on whether we are the actor of the observer in a situation. The above examples also help explain a related phenomenon called the actor-observer bias. So when someone else is late for work, we might blame it on a personality flaw such as a lack of conscientiousness.

Internal: When we make internal attributions, we chalk a behavior up to someone’s internal characteristics.

For example, blaming being late for work on heavy traffic is an example of an external attribution.

External: When we make external attributions, we blame outside factors for why something happened or why someone behaved a certain way.

In this case, this is a form of attribution bias that affects how we perceive and explain behavior.Īttributions can be generally divided into two different types: The self-serving bias is a type of cognitive bias, which are errors in thinking that can distort perceptions and judgments. And if you are always blaming bad things on outside factors, it inhibits personal growth and stops you from reflecting on the ways that you could improve. If you think your successes are really due to your own inherent skills or knowledge, you might be tempted to never try to learn more to get better. While the self-serving bias is a natural human tendency, it can become a really problem when it distorts how people interpret the reality of a situation. It’s also why you might blame your teacher when you do poorly on an assignment (“She never explained anything, and the questions on the test didn’t make any sense!). It’s why we might boast about our talents and hard work when things go our way but focus on external, situational factors when we don’t live up to expectations.įor example, it’s why you might attribute your good score on an exam to your inherent intelligence (“Of course, I did great I’m gifted!”). The self-serving bias involves taking credit for our success but blaming others for our failures.

Is an example of actor observer bias