Steve: Self Serving Bias

By: steve-wang

The Self Serving Bias is where someone connects positive outcomes to themselves and negative outcomes to outside factors. Everyone might fall into this bias to protect themselves. Be it their, ego, position or something else. For example if a person is late, they might say the bus was slow today but they ran towards the bus stop to be able to catch the earlier bus which caused them to be only slightly late and note very late. However, when others do it, you might view it as them being lazy or incompetent. Another example could be if a project was incomplete, the person might say I have completed the part I was supposed to complete but my teammate did nothing. A person who falls into the self serving bias could be seen as arrogant and self important because they would keep claiming that if things go right it was because of them but if things go wrong, someone else is at fault. We could avoid this by thinking properly to find the actual cause of something or we could reflect more on our actions and the situation.