Joachim Andersen

Accelerated Learning

Self-Serving Bias: Why We Take Credit and Shift Blame

An ornate antique gold hand mirror on dark velvet at night reflecting a small gold trophy cup beside it, while a cracked black ceramic cup lies on its side in the shadow outside the reflection
We see our wins in the mirror and leave our failures in the shadows.


Self-Serving Bias is the tendency to take credit for our successes and blame our failures on circumstances. When things go well, it was our skill, effort or judgment. When they go badly, it was bad luck, other people or a situation nobody could have predicted.

It’s typically noticeable after a project review. The parts that worked feel like the result of our good decisions, while the parts that did not work feel like the result of a tight deadline, a difficult client or a change we could not control. Both explanations can be true, but it’s suspicious how neatly they line up in our favor.

The essence of Self-Serving Bias is to ask: “Would I explain this outcome the same way if it had happened to someone else, or if the result had been the opposite?”


Origin: Explaining Success and Failure

The idea grew out of attribution theory, the study of how people explain the causes of behavior. In the 1950s, the Austrian-born psychologist Fritz Heider observed that in ambiguous situations people often explain events in ways that protect their self-esteem. In 1975, Dale Miller and Michael Ross published one of the first major reviews of what they called self-serving biases in the attribution of causality, asking whether the pattern was really motivated or could be explained by what people expect to happen.

Since then, the evidence has become hard to ignore. A 2004 meta-analysis by Amy Mezulis and colleagues combined 266 studies and found a large self-serving bias in nearly all samples. It was much stronger in samples from the United States than in samples from Asia, and much weaker among people with depression, which suggests that the bias may also help protect our mood.


Key Concepts

  • Internal Credit, External Blame
    We attribute good outcomes to stable, personal causes like ability and effort, and bad outcomes to temporary, outside causes like luck, timing or other people.

  • Self-Enhancement
    Part of the bias comes from a wish to feel good about ourselves and to protect our self-esteem.

  • Self-Presentation
    Part of it comes from a wish to look good to others, which is why it can be stronger when we explain results in public.

  • Egocentric Memory
    My own contributions are easier to remember than other people’s, so we naturally overestimate our share of any joint effort.

  • Different From Judging Others
    When we explain other people’s behavior, we tend to make the opposite mistake and blame their character rather than their situation, which I write about in Fundamental Attribution Error.


Some Examples

  • Winners Played Well, Losers Were Unlucky
    In a 1980 study, Richard Lau and Dan Russell analyzed newspaper accounts of professional baseball and football games, including the World Series. Of the explanations given from the winning team’s perspective, 74.9% pointed to internal causes such as skill and effort, compared to 54.9% from the losing side. The difference was strongest among players and coaches after a win, while sportswriters were more even-handed.

  • The Letter to Shareholders
    In 1983, James Bettman and Barton Weitz analyzed the letters to shareholders in 181 corporate annual reports. Good results were credited more to the company and its management, while bad results were blamed more on external, unstable and uncontrollable factors. The same pattern found in individual people showed up at the level of entire companies.

  • Who Does More at Home
    In a 1979 study, Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked 37 married couples to estimate their own share of responsibility for 20 activities, from cleaning dishes to caring for children and even causing arguments. When the husband’s and wife’s estimates were added together, the total exceeded 100% in 27 of the 37 couples. Each spouse could more easily remember their own contributions than those of their partner.

  • Two Sides, Same Facts, Different Fairness
    In a series of experiments by Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein, pairs of students negotiated a real Texas lawsuit in which an injured motorcyclist sued a car driver for $100,000. Both sides read the same 27 pages of case material. Even though they were paid a bonus for guessing correctly, those playing the plaintiff predicted that the judge would award $14,527 more on average than those playing the defendant. In a later version of the experiment, when people learned their role only after reading the case, just 6% of negotiations ended in an impasse, compared to 28% when they knew their role from the start.


Applying Self-Serving Bias

The bias is hard to see from the inside, because each explanation we give feels reasonable on its own. What helps me is to look at the pattern across outcomes and to borrow the perspective of someone without a stake in the result. This is the simple process I follow:

  1. Write Down the Causes Before the Result
    Before a project or decision plays out, I note what I think will drive success or failure, so I cannot rewrite the story afterward.

  2. Apply the Same Standard to Wins and Losses
    I ask what part luck and circumstances played in my successes, and what part my own choices played in my failures.

  3. Swap the Roles
    I imagine that a colleague had produced the same result and ask how I would explain it then.

  4. List the Weaknesses in My Own Case
    Before a negotiation or disagreement, I write down the strongest arguments against my position. In a follow-up study, Babcock and Loewenstein found that doing this reduced impasses.

  5. Ask Someone Without a Stake
    I ask a person who is not involved in the outcome to explain what happened, and compare their account with mine.


Pitfalls and Limitations

  • A little of it may be healthy. The weaker bias among people with depression suggests that some self-serving thinking helps us stay motivated and resilient after setbacks. The goal is not to blame myself for everything, but to learn from what I can control.

  • Sometimes the outside world really is to blame. Not every external explanation is an excuse, which is why I try to check my explanations against the facts, rather than assume they are biased.

  • It feeds conflict. When both sides of a dispute believe the fair outcome is the one that favors them, they can both act in good faith and still fail to agree.

  • It blocks learning. If our failures are always someone else’s fault, we have nothing to change, and we miss the lessons that would make the next attempt better.


Related Mental Models

Self-Serving Bias reminds me that the story I tell about my own results is rarely neutral. By holding my successes and failures to the same standard, borrowing an outsider’s perspective and writing down what I expect before the result is known, I get a more honest picture of what I actually did and what I can do better next time.



To learn more about mental models and philosophy,
check out: Wise: How to Attain a Deep Understanding of the World, History, Our Place in It, and How to Live Well



📚 Sources and References