Weiner focused his attribution theory on achievement (Weiner, 1974). He identified ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck as the most important factors affecting attributions for achievement.

Definition. Self-attribution refers to the process through which people determine the antecedents and consequences of their behaviors.

Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the causes of behavior and events. For example, is someone angry because they are bad-tempered or because something bad happened?

Attributions occur when people attempt to interpret or to find an explanation to understand why people behave in certain ways. Actor-observer discrepancy. Nonetheless, two of the most common attribution errors are the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias.

The fundamental attribution error exists because of how people perceive the world. While you have at least some idea of your character, motivations, and situational factors that affect your day-to-day, you rarely know everything that’s going on with someone else.

For example, the fundamental attribution error can cause someone to assume that if some stranger looks angry, then they must be an angry person in general, even though this person might have been driven to temporary anger by something, such as someone else being rude to them.

Understanding the fundamental attribution error is important because research shows that everyday human behavior is heavily influenced by external factors, yet when evaluating others’ behavior, you may wrongly perceive their actions as stemming from internal factors.

4 Steps to overcoming Attribution Bias

1. Realization. The first step towards reducing and overcoming attribution bias to recognize that these are cognitive biases and are present in each individual in varying degrees.
2. Start Challenging your stories.
3. Try to verify your story.
4. Avoid blaming others (externalizing the blame)

People from an individualistic culture, that is, a culture that focuses on individual achievement and autonomy, have the greatest tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error.

Collectivist countries are less likely to make the fundamental attribution error than Western countries because their cultures emphasize social roles rather than individualism. The actor-observer bias is a bias in explanations for your behaviors versus other people’s behaviors.

What do the fundamental attribution error and the self-fulfilling prophecy have in common? We believe something about another person that may not be true.

Inclusive of that issue, remember there is also self-serving bias, where individuals attribute positive dealings to their own character and negative dealings to external factors, and fundamental attribution error, when an individual assigns blame or a cause of something to the person themselves and does not take into …

Examples of self-serving bias For example: A student gets a good grade on a test and tells herself that she studied hard or is good at the material. She gets a bad grade on another test and says the teacher doesn’t like her or the test was unfair. Athletes win a game and attribute their win to hard work and practice.

Self-serving bias can quickly infect your workplace, leading to a bevy of treacherous problems. If it gets especially bad, it can distort the perception of self, impair one’s ability to evaluate problems and generate hostility towards others—leading to conflict and worse.

self-serving bias. the tendency to perceive oneself favorably. self-serving attributions. tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.

Self-serving attributions are explanations for one’s successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one’s failures that blame external, situational factors. People do this to protect their self-esteem, and essential component of their general success in the world.

Self-serving biased attributions (internal attribution of positive and external attribution of negative events) were associated with striatal activation, previously implicated in the motivational control of behavior as well as in the mediation of hallucinations and delusions.

The self-serving bias is defined as people’s tendency to attribute positive events to their own character but attribute negative events to external factors. It’s a common type of cognitive bias that has been extensively studied in social psychology.

Bias against yourself can take many forms including: not taking up opportunities, putting things off or not facing up to problems. Bias is keeping us from speaking up, seeking feedback or from being more creative. It can shape our attitudes toward our colleagues in ways that can undermine our own credibility.

The definition of self serving is a person or action done only for one’s own benefit, sometimes at the expense of others. An example of self-serving is a lie told to make yourself look better. A speech full of self-serving comments.

How to avoid the self serving bias?

1. Give others credit during success. Every time you succeed, try to find 5 people or reasons behind the victory.
2. Find an area for improvement for any bad outcome.
3. Give yourself extra time to evaluate the outcome.