Self-centered Biases in Attributions of Responsibility

Abstract

This chapter deals with systematic biases in attributions of responsibility that may be associated with such activities. It argues that allocations of responsibility for a group product tend to be self-centered: Individuals take more credit than other participants attribute to them. The participants in scientific disputes frequently attribute a divergence in opinion to their opponent’s malevolence. For a number of reasons, the availability of the person’s own inputs may be facilitated by differential encoding and storage of self-generated responses. The self-fulfilling prophecy interpretation implies: that players should be more optimistic about their own future performances than their teammates would be; and that players’ expectations should predict recall of their own performance, independently of their actual performance. A simple appreciation of the pervasiveness of the bias, and of one’s own susceptibility, may yield quite different attributions for its occurrence.