Self serving bias

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. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more responsibility for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their ego from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions is exhibiting the self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace,interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions.

Both motivational processes (i.e. self-enhancement, self-presentation) and cognitive processes (i.e. locus of control, self-esteem) influence the self-serving bias. There are both cross-cultural (i.e. individualistic and collectivistic culture differences) and special clinical population (i.e. depression) considerations within the bias. Much of the research on the self-serving bias has used participant self-reports of attribution based on experimental manipulation of task outcomes or in naturalistic situations. Some more modern research, however, has shifted focus to physiological manipulations, such as emotional inducement and neural activation, in an attempt to better understand the biological mechanisms that contribute to the self-serving bias.

The theory of self-serving biases first came to attention in the late 1960s to early 1970s. As research on this topic continued to grow some people saw concerns. In 1971, fear emerged that the hypothesis would prove to be incorrect much like the perceptual defense hypothesis by Dixon. However, the theory now holds strong. When this theory was still being developed it was during the research of attribution bias. Fritz Heider found that in ambiguous situations people made attributions based on their own needs and in order to maintain a higher self-esteem and viewpoint. This specific tendency became what we now know as self-serving. Miller and Ross conducted a study in 1975 that was one of the earliest to assess not only self-serving bias but they looked at the attributions for successes and failures within this theory.

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