Definition
Self-serving bias is a psychological strategy referring to the tendency of people to make internal attributions for positive outcomes and external attributions for negative outcomes.
Heider (1958) first enunciated self-serving bias in his explanation of attributions for ambiguous situations. He claimed that attributions are shaped by “a person’s own needs or wishes” (Heider 1958, p. 118). Thus, self-serving bias refers to somewhat distorted explanations and inaccurate interpretations of the given situation as compared to an objective standard. Two accounts have been defined to explain biases in the service of the self: the cognitive account and the motivational account.
The cognitive account states that self-serving bias is a result of limited cognitive capacity rather than a motivated strategy (Miller and Ross 1975). Accordingly, individuals as naïve scientists strive to use the available information...
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Doğruyol, B., Yilmaz, O., Bahçekapili, H.G. (2021). Self-Serving Bias. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1525-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1525-1
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