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A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. [1] It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. [2]
The self-serving bias has been thought of as a means of self-esteem maintenance. [39] A person will feel better about themselves by taking credit for successes and creating external blames for failure. This is further reinforced by research showing that as self-threat increases, people are more likely to exhibit a self-serving bias. [40]
A 2006 meta-analysis found little support for a related bias, the actor–observer asymmetry, in which people attribute their own behavior more to the environment, but others' behavior to individual attributes. [9] The implications for the fundamental attribution error, the author explained, were mixed.
Self-serving bias is the tendency for cognitive or perceptual processes to be distorted by the individual's need to maintain and enhance self-esteem. [57] It is the propensity to credit accomplishment to our own capacities and endeavors, yet attribute failure to outside factors, [ 58 ] to dismiss the legitimacy of negative criticism ...
It accounts for the fact that many biases are self-motivated or self-directed (e.g., illusion of asymmetric insight, self-serving bias). There are also biases in how subjects evaluate in-groups or out-groups; evaluating in-groups as more diverse and "better" in many respects, even when those groups are arbitrarily defined ( ingroup bias ...
Originally, researchers assumed that self-serving bias is strongly related to the fact that people want to protect their self-esteem. However, an alternative information processing explanation is that when the outcomes match people's expectations, they make attributions to internal factors; for example, someone who passes a test might believe ...
Casual acquaintances and true strangers however do exhibit a self-serving attribution bias. [135] Where no self-serving bias is exhibited in a relationship, a betrayal of trust in the relationship will reinstate the self-serving bias. This corresponds to findings that relationship satisfaction is inversely correlated with the betrayal of trust ...
In a different paper, Buehler and colleagues suggest an explanation in terms of the self-serving bias in how people interpret their past performance. By taking credit for tasks that went well but blaming delays on outside influences, people can discount past evidence of how long a task should take. [6]