Self-serving Attributional Bias Research Articles

What to Blame? Self-Serving Attribution Bias with Multi-Dimensional Uncertainty

Abstract People often receive feedback influenced by external factors, yet little is known about how this affects self-serving biases. Our theoretical model explores how multi-dimensional uncertainty allows additional degrees of freedom for self-serving bias. In our Primary experiment, feedback combining an individual’s ability and a teammate’s ability leads to biased belief updating. However, in a Follow-up with a random fundamental replacing the teammate, unbiased updating occurs. A Validation experiment shows belief distortion is greater when outcomes originate from human actions. Overall, our experiments highlight how multi-dimensional environments can enable self-serving biases.

Rising Above vs. Falling Below: When and Why Status Change Affects Interpersonal Helping in Workgroups

The current research sheds new light on how and why status hierarchies impact interpersonal helping by examining people’s reactions to recently experienced status change. Specifically, we incorporate findings from research on the self-serving attributional bias to theorize about how the direction of status change (i.e., a gain or a loss) can shape the extent to which people accept or deflect personal responsibility for their change in status, which we argue will then impact other-concern and, thus, their willingness to help. Further, we identify status change legitimacy as a key contingency that will strengthen or weaken the psychological and behavioral effects of status change. Among firefighter teams (Study 1), participants in the laboratory (Studies 2 and 3), and student teams (Study 4), we show that (1) status change impacts interpersonal helping through its impact on changes in other-concern and (2) status change legitimacy moderates the effect of status change on both other-concern and interpersonal helping. Additionally, we document an asymmetry with regards to the effects of status change on both other-concern and helping behavior (i.e., with the negative impact of a status loss being stronger than the positive impact of a status gain). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Croatian Combat Athletes’ Attribution Patterns for Their Successes and Failures

Successes and failures are integral outcomes to the sport experience. Based on decades of research, how athletes process both outcomes influence their thoughts, emotions, and subsequent achievement endeavors. Attribution theory details three dimensions as to the causes of success and failure. Since the 1980s, attribution theory has found a home in sport psychology literature. However, research across countries requires valid and reliable questionnaires. One such country is Croatia where attribution research is scant. Thus, in a Croatian combat athlete sample, we examined athletes’ attributions for the most and least successful performances via retrospection. Croatian athletes (N = 154) from three combat sports (judo, karate, and taekwondo) who all competed at least once on an international stage completed the Croatian Causal Dimension Scale-II, answered in reference to a specific reason for their best and worst competitive experience. Results showed that the combat sport athletes attributed their most and least successful competitive achievement to psychological reasons more than other reasons (i.e., general preparation and physical preparation). Furthermore, based on a series of two-tailed paired samples t-tests and the nonparametric equivalent, Wilcoxon signed rank test, the participants made, from small to medium in meaningfulness (Cohen’s d), more internal (d = 0.30), stable (d = 0.56), personal (d = 0.30), and external (d = 0.21) controllable attributions for success than for failure (all t-test p-values < 0.01). Our results suggest the athletes made the self-serving attribution bias across both the success and failure competitive events. Our results contribute to better understanding of specific reasons for success and failure and the attribution dimensions explaining the competitive outcomes in competitive combat sport. Specific to Croatian sport, our results provide Croatian combat sport with theory driven research applicable to improving development of Croatian combat athletes on the international stage.

Problems with Premortems: Self-Serving Attribution Bias in a Popular Debiasing Strategy

Before making major decisions, managers engage in prospective hindsight – imagining a future outcome and working backward from that outcome – to anticipate risks. The most popular type of prospective hindsight is the “premortem” – imagining a negative future outcome and identifying reasons why it occurred. Premortems have been broadly endorsed by psychologists and Nobel Prize winners as a debiasing strategy over the past two decades. However, surprisingly little research has investigated the premortem to identify whether or not it actually works. Across three studies that span prediction and planning domains, we find that the types of risks premortems identify are systematically biased. We contrast premortems, preparades, and preflections – imagining bad, good, or undefined outcomes – and find that individuals who engage in a premortem focus far more attention on factors outside of their control than do individuals who engage a preparade or preflection. Further, this effect persists across perspectives: individuals imagining self-relevant and other-relevant outcomes exhibit this bias. Together, our results suggest that although premortems mute overconfidence, they introduce attribution bias, ironically focusing managers’ attention away from the risks most within their control.

How Do Voters Hold Politicians Accountable for Personal Welfare? Evidence of a Self-Serving Bias

Examining a government’s record is difficult. This is a problem for voters who want to hold governments accountable. One solution is for voters to hold governments accountable for changes in their personal welfare. Yet, it is often unclear whether changes in personal welfare are caused by government policies or voters’ own actions. Since voters have a desire to protect their self-image, this ambiguity might fuel a self-serving bias in attribution. That is, voters might take personal responsibility for positive changes in personal welfare and hold the government responsible for negative changes. Using data from election surveys and survey experiments, this article shows that voters attribute responsibility for personal welfare in this self-serving way. This hurts democratic accountability because voters do not reward governments (enough) for improving their personal welfare.

Effect of Robot Tutor’s Feedback Valence and Attributional Style on Learners

This study investigated the effect of a robot tutor’s feedback valence (positive feedback and negative feedback) and attributional style (internal-attribution and external-attribution) on learners. A Nao robot was designed to be a dance tutor that taught participants dance movements and gave performance feedback. Thirty-six graduate and undergraduate students participated in the experiments and were divided into two groups: an internal-attribution group and an external-attribution group. Participants in each group received both positive and negative feedback. The results indicated that the participants were more likely to accept positive feedback than negative feedback. In addition, they perceived greater influence by positive feedback than negative feedback. Moreover, participants did not the demonstrate self-serving attributional bias. They attributed more blame to themselves than to the robot for negative performance, whereas no difference was observed in the attribution of credit between the robot and the participants. Furthermore, the internal-attribution robot tutor was more likely to be regarded as a training coach instead of a training tool than the external-attribution robot tutor. Finally, participants reported a higher relationship closeness with the internal-attribution robot tutor than the external-attribution robot tutor.

Insensitivity to Success and Failure: An Experimental Study of Performance-Based Feedback in Depression.

ObjectiveThis experimental study set out to examine the effects of performance feedback (success or failure) on depressed emotions and self-serving attribution bias in inpatients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD).MethodsThe study was based on a 2 × 2 experimental design in which 71 MDD patients and 59 healthy controls participated. Both groups (MDD and controls) were randomly assigned to two conditions: success or failure in the performance feedback. A section of Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) was used as a bogus test of the participants’ reasoning abilities, and the Core Depressive Factor of the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale was used to measure changes in depressed emotion in the subjects following the performance feedback. Participants then rated the accuracy of the SPM as a measure of their reasoning capacity.ResultsThe levels of depressed emotions in patients with MDD did not differ significantly under the two feedback conditions. In contrast, depressed emotion levels increased significantly in healthy individuals in response to failure feedback but did not change in response to success feedback. With regard to the ratings of SPM accuracy, there was no significant difference across the two feedback conditions for depressed patients; however, the accuracy ratings were higher in the success condition than in the failure condition for the controls.ConclusionIndividuals with MDD exhibit blunted emotional reactivity when experiencing new positive or negative social stimuli, supporting the theory of Emotion Context Insensitivity. In addition, self-serving attribution bias does not occur in MDD, which is consistent with the theory of learned helplessness in depression.

A Matter of Perspective: How Failure Shapes Distributive Preferences

People vary in what they view as a fair distribution of earnings in organizations and, more generally, society. Where do these different views originate? We study the question of whether the experience of failure or success in a winner-take-most competition shapes people’s perspectives about distributive justice. In a laboratory experiment, subjects generated a high or low income either through a lottery or through a performance-based tournament. A subset of subjects could then redistribute the income of another subset of subjects. We find that the tournament losers redistribute significantly more than all of the other distributors when the inequality is generated by the tournament, whereas the lottery losers redistribute significantly more than all of the other distributors when the inequality is generated by the lottery. The effect still holds when controlling for potential self-selection into different outcomes of the tournament. We replicate the results in a second experiment and show that the underlying psychological mechanisms include an in-group bias and a self-serving bias in responsibility attribution. These findings have implications for the design of compensation schemes in organizations and for public policies in general. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

The Joint Effect of Accounting Knowledge and Self-serving Attribution on the Voluntary Disclosure of Management Earnings Forecast

Manuscript type: Research paper Research aims: This study investigates the effect of accounting knowledge and self-serving attribution bias on the voluntary disclosure of management earnings forecast. Design/Methodology/Approach: An experimental design is conducted with 58 business programme graduate students. The participants are placed into two groups: low accounting knowledge and high accounting knowledge. The two groups are then randomly assigned to either the internal or external attribution condition. Research findings: The results show that managers with high accounting knowledge are more likely to issue management earnings forecasts than those with low accounting knowledge. This study, however, indicates that the willingness to disclose management earnings forecasts is not dependent on the self-serving attribution. Despite this, the findings illustrate that the joint effect of the accounting knowledge and self-serving attribution will influence the voluntary disclosure of management earnings forecast. Specifically, managers with low accounting knowledge are more likely to withhold information if the cause of the unfavourable performance is due to internal factors. In contrast, they are more willing to disclose their future earnings failure if it is due to external factors. This situation, nevertheless, does not apply to managers with high accounting knowledge who tend to issue future earnings information, regardless of the internal or external factor. Theoretical contributions/Originality: This study delineates the boundary effect of accounting knowledge and self-serving attribution on management disclosure decisions. The results of this study reveal that self-serving attribution bias influences managers’ level of willingness in voluntarily disclosing management earnings forecast, under unfavourable outcomes.Practitioner/Policy implication: The results of this study also reveal that high accounting knowledge can reduce the effect of self-serving attribution bias on managers’ judgment, thereby making it more practical for managers to acquire more accounting knowledge. Research limitation: This study treats the level of accounting knowledge based on the number of accounting courses taken by the participants rather than testing their accounting knowledge per se. Keywords: Management Earnings Forecast, Attribution Bias, Accounting Knowledge JEL Classification: M41

Growth motivation moderates a self-serving attribution bias in the health domain

Past research on the self-serving attribution bias has shown that people typically protect their self-worth by attributing shortcomings to external factors to avoid personal responsibility. Subsequent work suggests that this pattern is attenuated among individuals highly motivated to achieve personal growth. We attempted to conceptually replicate past research on this moderating effect in a novel context. After measuring personality variation in growth motivation, participants (N = 126 college students) were randomly provided feedback implying that they were less healthy than their peers (failure), healthier than their peers (success) or a no feedback control. We found that among participants receiving failure feedback, growth motivation negatively predicted the extent to which participants attributed health outcomes to luck. While the expected pattern of the self-serving attribution bias was implied at very low levels of growth motivation, failure caused high growth-motivation participants to believe that their health was less influenced by chance factors.

The effect of result publicity on self-serving attributional bias \u2014\u2014 a social comparison perspective

Self-serving bias suggests that people tend to attribute success to internal factors and attribute failure to external factors (Bradley, J Pers Soc Psychol 36:56–71,1978; Miller and Ross, Psychol Bull 82:213–225,1975). However, the results of the attribution of failure are not always consistent. Some studies have found that people attribute failure to external factors (Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfileld, 1976) and others suggest that people attribute failure to internal factors (Ross et al., J Pers Soc Psychol 29:609–618,1974). I tested self-serving bias in two different contexts in mainland China: in one, test results were public (students had access to each other’s test results) and in the other, test results were private (students only had access to his/her own results). When a context triggers individuals to compare themselves to others, individuals may alter their attribution of failure in order to preserve their self-image and self-esteem. Data were analyzed by repeated measure ANOVA, and the results show that in a public context people tend to attribute failure more to external factors than to themselves. Also, results suggest that people attribute failure less to themselves in a public context than in a private context.

Subjective Reasons for Littering: A Self-serving Attribution Bias as Justification Process in an Environmental Behaviour Model

Subjective causal explanations for littering of waste are investigated through a questionnaire-based survey (N = 147). Participants were asked if they littered waste in the past, and if so why, and they were also asked why they think some other people litter. 71% of the participants admitted having littered in the past. An analysis of the perceived reasons for littering showed significant differences between the reasons provided for own as compared to other people’s littering. The differences found were in line with previous research demonstrating a self-serving bias in intrapersonal as compared to interpersonal attributions. Own littering is often “justified” by external causes for example shortcomings in the infrastructure, such as missing or filled garbage cans, whereas negative personal attributions such as ignorance, naivety, and convenience are most commonly considered to cause littering by others. Findings are discussed with reference to the integrative Model of Justified Behaviour (MJB) (Hansmann and Steimer 2015) which covers a broad range of factors including attitudes, norms, knowledge, restrictions and options, habit formation, and evaluative processes of justification as determinants of behavioural decision-making. Implications for environmental management and for the design of anti-littering campaigns and environmental education are discussed.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.73.1.18521

Grandiose Narcissists’ Public Versus Private Attributions for a Collaborative Success

Grandiose narcissists tend to exhibit stronger self-serving attributional biases (SSABs) and seek public recognition for accomplishments. We examined whether grandiose narcissists are especially self-serving regarding a team success when making attributions publicly versus privately, and whether this depends on whether their partner is a friend or stranger. College students imagined winning a contest involving collaboration with a partner (friend/stranger), and then distributed credit and monetary reward for the team’s success in an imagined public (“TV interview”) or private (“anonymous survey”) context. Participants higher in grandiose narcissism exhibited greater SSAB when partnered with a stranger than a friend, especially when making attributions for earned monetary award in a “public” context. In contrast, participants lower in narcissism did not exhibit SSAB in any experiment condition. In fact, they exhibited a partner-favoring bias (in monetary reward allocations) in the “public” context when partnered with a stranger. Implications for real world reward distributions are discussed.

A Matter of Perspective: How Experience Shapes Preferences for Redistribution

We investigate in a laboratory experiment if the experience of economic failure or success shapes people’s preferences for redistribution beyond self-interest. Subjects generated a high or a low income either through a lottery or through an effort-based tournament. A sub-set of subjects could then redistribute the income of another sub-set of subjects. We find that individuals who lost the tournament (lottery) redistribute significantly more than all the other types of distributors when the inequality is generated by the tournament (lottery). The effect still holds when controlling for self-selection into different outcomes of the tournament and can be explained by in- or out-group bias and a self-serving bias in responsibility attribution. These findings have implications for public policies and for the design of compensation schemes in organizations.

Intergenerational objective and subjective mobility and attitudes towards income differences: evidence from transition societies

This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income differences than objective mobility because individuals filter their objective environment in order to derive their subjective perceptions of the world and their own experiences. The described hypotheses are tested with two cross-national data sets – European Values Studies and Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings are robust to alternative statistical specifications and indicate that individuals who perceive themselves as subjectively mobile have significantly different attitudes towards income differences in comparison to non-mobile groups, but that this effect does not manifest among objectively mobile individuals.

The Effect of Affect in Self-Serving Attribution Bias

The Effect of Affect in Self-Serving Attribution Bias

Sharing one’s fortune? An experimental study on earned income and giving

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between earnings and charitable giving, in an environment in which earnings depend on luck but not in a manner that makes its contribution obvious. We set up a real effort experiment, in which subjects enter data in four one-hour occasions and are paid a piece rate. From the second occasion onwards, we randomly assign half of the subjects to a treatment with higher piece rates, without the subjects being explicitly made aware of the random assignment into the two groups. At the end we ask subjects whether they want to donate a share of their earnings to a charity of their choice. We find that, despite large differences in earnings due to the different piece rates, subjects receiving the higher piece rate are actually less likely to give, and that givers in the two groups give the same share of their total earnings. Charities receive the same average donation from members of the two groups, indicating that charitable giving by subjects in this experiment does not increase with income. We discuss how these results can be explained by self-serving attribution bias.

Why the referees’ reports I receive as an editor are so much better than the reports I receive as an author?

Authors tend to attribute manuscript acceptance to their own ability to write quality papers and simultaneously to blame rejections on negative bias in peer review, displaying a self-serving attributional bias. Here, a formal model provides rational explanations for this self-serving bias in a Bayesian framework. For the high-ability authors in a very active scientific field, the model predictions are: (1) Bayesian-rational authors are relatively overconfident about their likelihood of manuscript acceptance, whereas authors who play the role of referees have less confidence in manuscripts of other authors; (2) if the final disposition of his or her manuscript is acceptance, the Bayesian-rational author almost surely attributes this decision more to his or her own ability; (3) when the final disposition is rejection, the Bayesian-rational author almost surely attributes this decision more to negative bias in peer review; (4) some rational authors do not learn as much from the critical reviewers' comments in case of rejection as they should from the journal editor's perspective. In order to validate the model predictions, we present results from a survey of 156 authors. The participants in the experimental study are authors of articles published in Scientometrics from 2000 to 2012.

Experienced Financial Managers' Views of the Relationships among Self-Serving Attribution Bias, Overconfidence, and the Issuance of Management Forecasts: A Replication

ABSTRACT Using the same questions as Libby and Rennekamp (2015), we survey 110 experienced managers to examine their beliefs about the relationship between self-serving attribution bias, overconfidence, and management's issuance of earnings forecasts. As in Libby and Rennekamp (2015), we find that participants agree that, in general, managers are overconfident. They also agree that other managers likely overestimate the extent to which they contribute to positive firm performance, and that both optimism about the firm's future performance, as well as managers' confidence in their ability to predict future performance, increase the likelihood that earnings forecasts are provided. Finally, participants agree that providing earnings forecasts amplifies the costs of negative outcomes and the benefits of positive outcomes, consistent with the experimental assumption in Libby and Rennekamp (2012). These findings suggest that the experimental findings in Libby and Rennekamp (2012) match experienced managers' beliefs about how real-world earnings forecast decisions are made.

Commentary On: Experienced Financial Managers' Views of the Relationships among Self-Serving Attribution Bias, Overconfidence, and the Issuance of Management Forecasts: A Replication

Commentary On: Experienced Financial Managers' Views of the Relationships among Self-Serving Attribution Bias, Overconfidence, and the Issuance of Management Forecasts: A Replication