Have you noticed how your self-esteem goes up whenever you are successful at something, no matter how little effort you put into achieving that thing and how your spirits drop whenever you experience failure, despite your best efforts and hard work to reach your goal? The reason why this happens is a predictable human thinking flaw called self-serving bias and might be what’s holding you back from reaching your goals quickly and effectively. 

Keep reading to find out why taking outcomes at face value does not reveal the whole story about whether you have made the right decisions (or adjusted your efforts appropriately) in a given situation, as well as what you can do to combat self-serving bias and increase your odds of success in any endeavor.

What is self-serving bias? A definition from psychology

Self-serving bias is a cognitive bias that affects judgments about causality (what event or action is responsible for an outcome), which makes people more likely to believe that any positive result is due to their efforts, while any negative outcome is due to external factors such as bad luck. 

While self-serving bias might make us feel good about ourselves in the moment because it allows us to eschew responsibility when things don’t go our way, it is also a threat to our effectiveness since it does not allow us to examine which of our actions can be improved to increase the likelihood of success in the future. In other words, it breaks the feedback loop between our actions and their results, because it prevents us from truly understanding the connection between the two.

This happens because most people mistakenly think that failure is a reflection of their character or personality, when in reality any defeat is simply a piece of information about the method we have attempted to use to reach a goal. To quote Thomas Edison: 

“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” – Thomas Edison

Training yourself to recognize this fact is one of the most impactful things you can do in order to live a happier and more accomplished life. Say it with me, folks:

Failure is information, not a reflection of your character. -- The Stoic Optimizer

(Stick it on your bathroom mirror, if that helps.)

Why does self-serving bias occur?

Self-serving bias stems from a fragile ego, more specifically from an innate desire to maintain self-esteem. Psychologists have discovered that holding a bad opinion of oneself effectively causes suffering, which is why we are wired to preserve our self-esteem at all costs, even when this compromises our perception of reality. 

No wonder so many Eastern philosophies advocate for the suppression of the ego; it stands in the way of thinking clearly and behaving morally.

A second reason for which people experience self-serving bias is a tendency to view the world in an optimistic light, which means that we discount the probability of bad things occurring. As soon as we are surprised by a negative turn of events, due to our perception of this outcome being unlikely, we jump to the conclusion that the cause of this must be back luck, rather than continuing to examine the facts and uncover the real causality.

Furthermore, self-serving bias seems to be more prevalent in younger individuals, who have not yet lived long enough to either learn about this bias, or realize through experience that luck can play a significant role in their accomplishments.

What are some examples of self-serving bias?

One classical example of self-serving bias is when students think that failing a test is due to the teacher being unfair, rather than them not having studied enough. (Let’s admit we’ve all been there; hopefully we have now gained the maturity to avoid such a statement in the future.) One could argue that self-serving attribution is partially motivated by incentives in this case: the student believes that they can avoid being grounded for their bad grade if they can convince their parents that the teacher was unfair. They do not see the benefit of learning from their mistakes because they are motivated by short-term outcomes and their environment does not reward mastering the action-result feedback loop.

In the workplace, self-serving bias is most obvious when it comes to losing one’s job. If you are part of a lay-off, you might attribute this to the boss’ retribution based on an older grudge, but if you would ask your colleagues whether they thought the termination was undeserved, they might point to your diminishing performance. So whenever you suspect self-serving bias is at play, ask yourself whether you would identify the same cause-effect relationship if someone else told you the story of what just happened with them as the protagonist.

To get more insight into how we could spot self-serving bias in the wild, let’s examine a situation in which it doesn’t occur, although it very well could.

Imagine you ran a red light and got away with it. The police didn’t catch you and you didn’t get into an accident because there was no traffic. You wouldn’t dream of thinking that nothing bad happened because you are a skilled driver and it doesn’t take much introspection to realize that the reason you got away with it is pure luck. If you keep repeating this behavior, it is highly likely that your luck will run out and there will be negative consequences. This is something almost everyone understands, so self-serving bias doesn’t occur in this case. Whenever you are on the lookout for self-serving bias, ask yourself whether the causality you identify bears any semblance to associating reckless driving with good outcomes. Any similarity should trigger you to put on your critical thinking cap and dig deeper.

What is the opposite of self-serving bias? Self-serving bias vs. fundamental attribution error

Fundamental attribution error is another type of cognitive bias, which is closely related to self-serving bias because it also appears when making a judgment about causality. In contrast to self-serving bias, where we are dealing with causality which we might have contributed to, when it comes to fundamental attribution error, we are making a judgment about how the actions of other people may have influenced their success or failure. 

In a way, fundamental attribution error is the exact opposite of self-serving bias: we are more likely to believe that when other people are successful, this is due to luck, while any failure they might have is a reflection of their inadequate behavior or character. 

In other words, we are more inclined to be kind to ourselves and to explain away our mishaps than we are to give credit to others for their success or to overlook their failures.

This double-standard stems from an eternally human emotion: envy. Robert Greene expresses this with utmost clarity:

“Envy entails the admission to ourselves that we are inferior to another person in something we value. Not only is it painful to admit this inferiority, but it is even worse for others to see that we are feeling this.” – Robert Greene

Self-serving bias vs. confirmation bias

Self-serving bias and confirmation bias are often confused, because they both relate to our beliefs. However, knowing the difference between them can help you combat them more efficiently by allowing you to target your efforts. 

Confirmation bias makes us more likely to agree with facts and arguments that support what we already believe. For example, if you believe that cat people are better than dog people, if someone were to tell you that some university study proved that cat people have a higher average IQ than dog people, due to confirmation bias you would not spend too much mental energy to verify this fact, but rather accept it as is. While a misjudgment on how a preferred pet correlates with intelligence might not seem such a big deal, when the same misjudgment happens when it comes to trusting news about political candidates, confirmation bias can become a serious problem.

As you can see, self-serving bias refers to our beliefs about causality (what event or action caused which result), while confirmation bias affects our beliefs more generally. While the two act on different types of thought patterns, it is possible to be plagued by the double-whammy of confirmation bias AND self-serving bias. 

How would that manifest? Well, since you are already prone to believing that all good outcomes owe to your doing and all bad results are due to misfortune, confirmation bias makes it more likely that you will believe anything that supports these 2 theories. 

This is what makes self-serving bias so hard to conquer in the first place, but fear not and keep reading, as there is an exercise you can do to train yourself to resist it at the end of the post.

You can fight back against self-serving bias. Here’s how:

The easiest way to practice opposing your self-serving bias as it occurs is to start in a single area of your life, then expand towards all others. Here is a 3-step system you can use to train yourself to resist self-serving bias. Think of it as a feedback loop for identifying causality in daily life, which will help you make better decisions in the future.

Step 1: Pick a goal

I recommend picking an important goal, as your effort will be most meaningful there. It should be a goal where the results don’t depend on you exclusively, otherwise self-serving bias is less likely to appear. Some good candidates: getting into college, being promoted at work, finding a life partner etc. The more abstract the goal (and the more variables are involved in its achievement), the more likely self-serving bias is to manifest. 

This exercise doesn’t really work for goals such as weight loss, because in this case, the causality between action and result is not really debatable: if you eat sweets, you won’t lose any weight. There is no luck involved, since we know from science that all calories pass through the body - none of them evaporate by chance and make it as if you didn’t eat.

Step 2: Observe your journey towards the goal

Whenever something significant happens to push you either towards or away from that goal (let’s call such an event a “milestone”), think of all the variables that might have influenced the result. Separate them in 2 categories: factors that could have helped achieve this milestone and factors that could have prevented it from being reached. 

Don’t just list the obvious ones or those that make you look good, but go beyond that and think of the seemingly unlikely factors that could have impacted the events. The purpose is to step outside of your regular thinking patterns, which may be biased.

This step works even better if you take some notes about your assumptions (why you added a particular factor to that category), as you will be able to read those when a new milestone is reached and new information arises. You’ll then be able to see how far you were from identifying the real reason for which that particular milestone was reached.

Step 3: Reflect on the root cause of each intermediate state

Look at your list of factors that influenced the milestone. Which ones were crucial to reaching it? In other words, which of them 

If you haven’t added luck to either of the categories, decide in which one it would most likely fit for the current milestone. Be honest with yourself; if you wouldn’t have been able to achieve the intermediate milestone without luck, be grateful that fate played along and think about what you could have done better to skew the odds in your favor more (to rely less on luck).

Step 4: Ask others for their opinion

Since we are always focused on our own problems and journeys, it can be difficult to distance ourselves from the situation enough to be objective about our biases or even to spot when we might not be thinking clearly. 

If this is something you struggle with, it might help to ask a friend how they see the connection between your actions and results when it comes to a particular goal. Since they are not under the spell of ‘main character energy’, they are more likely to have an unclouded judgment. (Although, as we have already seen, they might be suffering from fundamental attribution error, so take it with a grain of salt if they immediately jump to the conclusion that you got lucky rather than worked hard.)

Assuming your friend has arguments to support their evaluation of the facts, if your first reaction to their interpretation of the events is one of disbelief (“I can’t believe they think I achieved this through luck alone!”), entertain the thought that they might have seen through your self-serving bias and appreciate their honesty. Ask yourself what you could have done to make the outcome less dependent on good fortune and more reliant on what is within your control.

Step 5: (Optional) use Stoicism to keep the luck-vs-skill dichotomy top of mind

The Stoics recognized the eternal human tendency to attribute good outcomes to skill and bad ones to luck and devised a way to address this from the get go. Whenever they set an intention to do something (or actually started), they reminded themselves that doing their best was up to them, while the result was not. They did this by applying a so-called reserve clause to their intention by adding 'fate permitting' to any plan. 

For example, a Stoic wouldn’t say “I’m going to work out tomorrow”, but rather “I’m going to work out tomorrow, fate permitting (because something might come up at work and make me stay there late)”. If you want to learn more about this Stoic reminder that helps combat self-serving bias, have a look at this post. 

Remember, this process doesn’t have to be perfect for you to get some insight out of it. You might need to do the exercise multiple times and on multiple goals before you have an AHA! moment, but I promise you, as soon as you realize the influence of luck in a situation whose good outcome you completely attributed to skill, you will be changed forever. Your decision-making will improve, because it will become more probabilistic: you will weigh the odds of success more carefully and construct back-up plans wherever necessary.

It’s totally within your reach to become more effective by combating your self-serving bias, so why don’t you give it a try?

If you found this post useful, you might want to explore another popular topic from the Human Bugs & Features category. How about this post about understanding motivation through Maslow's hierarchy of needs or this one about the just-world hypothesis, which is another cognitive bias?