Essay On Self Serving Bias

Self serving bias is the act of people attributing success to dispositional causes and failures to situational ones. For example, if someone does well on a test they will conclude that they are intelligent, while if they fail the test they will blame the teacher. The self serving bias occurs due to two major factors; motivational factors and cognitive factors. Motivational factors is the idea that attributing success with dispositional factors is used for increasing or maintaining self esteem. Individuals see attributing failure to external factors provides them with self protection from reality. Cognitive factors looks at how people usually expect to succeed based on personal abilities, so when they fail it is perceived as being the direct …show more content…
The results of the study showed that attributing success internally was 74.9% of the time from the perspective of the winning team. While only 54.9% of the attributions of the losing team were internal. The results have supported the idea of self serving bias, that success is attributed to internal factors such as strength, skill and intelligence. While failure is attributed with external factors such as; weather and bad calls from the refs. The study also supported the fact that the more egotistical a person is the more likely the person will succumb to the self serving bias.The strengths of the study was that the experimenters were able to show self serving bias in a real life situation meaning the ecological validity is very high. The study can be easily be replicable allowing results to be concluded. The study used a wide variety of sports and different levels of these sports, to allow a wide range of results. Weaknesses of the study, were that athletes the experimenters used may have had inflated egos. The study was unable to manipulate variables so there was no cause and