Archive for the ‘Self-serving bias’ tag
The Self-Serving Bias: 3 Steps to Total Eradication!
I love the word eradication. I don’t know why.
As a part of an overall approach to personal growth, it’s important to know when your mind – which is far more complex than many of us give it credit – is working on your behalf and when it isn’t. Or, to put it more specifically, when it thinks it’s working on your behalf… when in reality it’s doing the equivalent of tying your hands behind your back so you can’t hurt yourself… but can’t eat or drink either!
In so many ways, our minds have adapted almost too well over millennia. In an effort to protect us in the short-term, we can frequently be hurting ourselves over the long haul.
The self-serving bias is like that. It’s the tendency to see ourselves as responsible for our successes, but to see others – or the circumstances – as responsible for our failures.
This is so clearly a coping strategy – we do this to protect our self-image, improve our confidence, and keep ourselves from dwelling on the negative. We also do it to (at least seemingly) protect the image of ourselves in the eyes of others by playing up the good stuff and deferring blame for the bad stuff.
But is it healthy? Is that really who we strive to be? Someone who takes the credit and assigns blame?
I doubt it. Most of us would probably say that this doesn’t describe us at all. That we’re great about giving credit where it’s due and taking blame when things don’t go well. And of course, most of us would be kidding ourselves (there’s that damn bias again). Because who you think you are and who you actually are are rarely the same. That’s one of the core tenets of psychology.
