Cognitive Bias: Self-Serving Bias

Principal Category: Cognitive Biases

Authors:
•  Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. – Anthropologist, Scientist, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

The Self-Serving Bias, a cognitive tendency, leads individuals to attribute success to their abilities and efforts, while blaming external factors for failure. This bias impacts crime victims, fostering self-blame and guilt.

It perpetuates illusions by emphasizing strengths and achievements while overlooking faults and failures. Motivational and cognitive processes influence it, alongside cultural and clinical considerations. Research utilizes self-reports and physiological manipulations to understand its mechanisms. In scams, victims may succumb to the bias, justifying interactions with strangers and reinforcing trust.

Understanding this bias is crucial in navigating its influence on decision-making and perception. Explore more biases in the SCARS MANUAL OF COGNITIVE BIASES.

Self-Serving Bias

The Self-Serving Bias refers to the tendency for people to take credit for their successes and to blame others for their failures.

This Cognitive Bias – The Self-Serving Bias can affect crime victims by leading them to feel that they are somehow responsible for the crime that was committed against them. They may blame themselves for not being more careful or for not doing something to prevent the crime. This can lead to feelings of guilt and self-blame, which can further exacerbate the trauma of the crime.

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 credit for their group’s work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and errors, but they also serve the self’s need for esteem.

Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions (such as when you buy a good product, you made a good decision, but when you buy a bad one it was the manufacturer’s fault).

Both motivational processes (self-enhancement, self-presentation) and cognitive processes (i.e. locus of control, self-esteem) influence the self-serving bias. There are both cross-cultural (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.

One final aspect of this bias applies to scam victims at the very beginning of the scam. Of course, we all know that talking to strangers was a mistake, and that stranger trust helps to pull the victim in, but so does the Self-Serving Bias because it helps to convince the victim that they deserve whatever the fake relationship is providing.

More Cognitive Biases: SCARS MANUAL OF COGNITIVE BIASES (scampsychology.org)

Important Information for New Scam Victims

• See more at www.ScamVictimsSupport.org – a SCARS Website for New Scam Victims