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DON’T BLAME ME
Self-Serving Bias

Do you ever read annual reports, paying particular attention to the CEO’s
comments? No? That’s a pity, because there you’ll find countless examples of
this next error, which we all fall for at one time or another. For example, if the
company has enjoyed an excellent year, the CEO catalogues his indispensable
contributions: his brilliant decisions, tireless efforts and cultivation of a dynamic
corporate culture. However, if the company has had a miserable year, we read
about all sorts of other dynamics: the unfortunate exchange rate, governmental
interference, the malicious trade practices of the Chinese, various hidden tariffs,
subdued consumer confidence and so on. In short: we attribute success to
ourselves and failures to external factors. This is the self-serving bias.
Even if you have never heard the expression, you definitely know the self-
serving bias from high school. If you got an A, you were solely responsible; the
top grade reflected your intelligence, hard work and skill. And if you flunked? The
test was clearly unfair.

But grades don’t matter to you any more: perhaps the stock market has taken
their place. There, if you make a profit, you applaud yourself. If your portfolio
performs miserably, the blame lies exclusively with ‘the market’ (whatever you
imply by this) – or maybe that useless investment adviser. I, too, have periods
where I’m a power user of the self-serving bias: if my new novel rockets up the
bestseller list, I clap myself on the shoulder. Surely this is my best book yet! But, if
it disappears in the flood of new releases, it is because the readers simply don’t
recognise good literature when they see it. And if critics slay it, it is clearly a case
of jealousy.
To investigate this bias, researchers put together a personality test and
afterward, allocated the participants good or bad scores at random. Those who
got scored highly found the test thorough and fair; low scorers rated it completely
useless. So why do we attribute success to our own skill and ascribe failure to
other factors? There are many theories. The simplest explanation is probably this:
it feels good. Plus, it doesn’t cause any major harm. If it did, evolution would have