Exploring Causes of the Self‐serving Bias
Authors:
- 31 January 2008
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Social and Personality Psychology Compass
- Vol. 2 (2) , 895-908
Abstract
The self‐serving bias refers to a tendency for people to take personal responsibility for their desirable outcomes yet externalize responsibility for their undesirable outcomes. We review a variety of explanations for this attribution bias. Although researchers have historically pitted cognitive and motivational explanations for the self‐serving bias against one another, cognitive and motivation processes often work in tandem to lead people to conclude that they are responsible for the desirable but not the undesirable outcomes.Keywords
This publication has 52 references indexed in Scilit:
- Another Type of Self-serving Bias: Coexistence of Self-effacing and Group-serving Tendencies in Attribution in the Japanese CultureTHE JAPANESE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1997
- Asymmetrical effects of positive and negative events: The mobilization^minimization hypothesis.Psychological Bulletin, 1991
- Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health.Psychological Bulletin, 1988
- Depression, self-esteem, and the absence of self-protective attributional biases.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987
- From individual differences to social categories: Analysis of a decade's research on gender.American Psychologist, 1984
- The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history.American Psychologist, 1980
- Sex differences in attributions for sex-typed tasks1Journal of Personality, 1978
- Self-serving biases in the attribution process: A reexamination of the fact or fiction question.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978
- Attributing the causes of group performance: Effects of performance quality, task importance, and future testing1Journal of Personality, 1977
- Attributing causes for one's own performance: The effects of sex, norms, and outcomeJournal of Research in Personality, 1977