Is self-serving bias a problem?
Self-serving bias is a problem for us because it hampers improvement and growth. Instead of an honest reflection and appraisal of why things have gone well or badly, we blame outside forces for our own shortcomings.
Self-serving bias is a problem for us because it hampers improvement and growth. Instead of an honest reflection and appraisal of why things have gone well or badly, we blame outside forces for our own shortcomings.
Self-serving bias is quite easily observed in real life. For example, if I am late for work, I might easily blame the traffic, a slow driver I was stuck behind, or having to wait for a passenger. If I am on time, I might congratulate myself for planning ahead and taking account of possible hold-ups. In both cases, my self-esteem is preserved.
The old saying “a bad workman always blames his tools” is another way of stating at least part of the self-serving bias. The other part is taking credit when things go well.
The difference between anchoring bias and availability bias is that the former is a response to external or internal anchors that work as a starting point for estimates we form, whereas the latter favors the most recently available data.
Availability bias describes when a recent event (e.g., a plane crash) affects our assessment of how safe air travel is, because it is recent and well-publicized.
Anchoring bias can be seen in situations like purchasing a car. When we are offered, for example, a car for $20,000 that we can’t afford, that figure becomes an anchor, and a subsequent car priced at $15,000 seems cheap (even if it is objectively overpriced).
Anchoring and adjustment bias is a heuristic (mental shortcut) we use to estimate the answer to a general knowledge question. The anchor element is an initial educated guess, and it tends to limit how much we adjust our answers.
For example, if asked to estimate how long one billion seconds is, most people will underestimate the difference between one million and one billion (even though we know a billion is one thousand million).
So even if we know that a million seconds is equal to 12 days, few will correctly estimate a billion seconds correctly at 31 years.
Both actor-observer bias and self-serving bias are types of cognitive bias. Although they both help to explain our behavior, they are quite distinct.
Self-serving bias explains how we analyze the way we have behaved, depending on whether the outcome is positive or negative. For example, if we perform well in an examination, we are likely to credit ourselves, whereas if we perform badly, we will criticize the questions, our health, or other external factors.
Actor-observer bias describes how we attribute the cause of undesirable behavior in others to their own characteristics and our own undesirable behavior to external factors. If we (the actor) are late for a meeting, we might blame the traffic or other drivers, but if someone else is late, we (the observer) blame their lack of planning or foresight.
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