Truth 52. Don’t Blame Me! The Role of Self-Serving Bias
Did you ever notice that people are pretty good at deflecting blame for failures yet they’re quick to take credit for successes? This is not a random occurrence. In fact, it’s predictable.
Our perceptions of people differ from our perceptions of inanimate objects such as machines or buildings because we make inferences about the actions of people that we don’t make about inanimate objects. The result is that when we observe people, we attempt to develop explanations of why they behave in certain ways. Our perception and judgment of a person’s actions, therefore, will be significantly influenced by the assumptions we make about that person’s internal state.
Attribution theory can help us explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior. Basically, when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors: (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency. First, let’s clarify the differences between internal and external causation, and then we’ll elaborate on each of the three determining factors.
Internally caused behaviors are those that are believed to be under the personal control of the individual. Externally caused behavior is seen as resulting from outside causes; that is, the person is seen as having been forced into the behavior by the situation. If one of your employees is late for work, you might attribute his lateness to his partying into the wee hours of the morning and then oversleeping. This would be an internal attribution. But if you attribute his arriving late to a major automobile accident that tied up traffic on the road that this employee regularly uses, then you would be making an external attribution.
We judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior.
Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. Is the employee who arrives late today also the source of complaints by coworkers for being a “goof-off”? What we want to know is whether this behavior is unusual. If it is, the observer is likely to give the behavior an external attribution. If this action is not unusual, it will probably be judged as internal.
If everyone who is faced with a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows consensus. Our late employee’s behavior would meet this criterion if all employees who took the same route to work were also late. From an attribution perspective, if consensus is high, you would be expected to give an external attribution to the employee’s tardiness, whereas if other employees who took the same route made it to work on time, your conclusion as to causation would be internal.
Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Does the person respond the same way over time? Coming in 10 minutes late for work is not perceived in the same way for the employee for whom it is an unusual case (she hasn’t been late for several months) as it is for the employee for whom it is part of a routine pattern (she is regularly late two or three times a week). The more consistent the behavior, the more the observer is inclined to attribute it to internal causes.
One of the more interesting findings from attribution theory is that there are errors or biases that distort attributions. For instance, there is a tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors, such as ability or effort, while putting the blame for failure on external factors, such as luck. This self-serving bias can often make it hard to provide employees with honest and accurate feedback on their performance. Feedback given to employees in performance reviews will be predictably distorted by recipients, depending on whether it is positive or negative. So don’t be surprised that employees bend over backward patting themselves on the back for a positive evaluation while looking for external factors to put the blame on when evaluations are negative.
There is a tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors, such as ability or effort, while putting the blame for failure on external factors, such as luck.