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Usability & InteractionMember ingredient
Self-Serving Bias
Explaining favourable outcomes through your own qualities or actions more readily than unfavourable outcomes.
Public evidence overview
One checked source, with its limits.
This preview is not the complete evidence base. Use it as a question to investigate in your own product, not as a prediction of what an individual will do.
Checked source previewAcademic paper
Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias
Research-assisted source review
- What it supports
- The average effect was large, but varied meaningfully. Children and older adults showed larger effects; Asian samples showed smaller effects than US and other Western samples; and samples with psychopathology, particularly depression, showed attenuated effects.
- Where it may not transfer
- The synthesis combined varied tasks, outcomes and attribution measures. Group differences do not diagnose an individual, and the association with psychopathology does not mean that less self-serving attribution causes illness or that greater self-blame is desirable.
See how sources and limitations are checked in our editorial method.
Member depth
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Practitioner includes the complete checked source set, study context and practical takeaways for this ingredient. The public overview above remains available without upgrading.