Self-serving bias —Or why we explain our successes through who we are, and our failures through what happened to us

From the "Our Everyday Mind" series

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You win a tennis match and explain, almost without thinking: I played really well, I trained seriously these past few weeks. You lose the next match and the explanation shifts completely: my opponent had an extraordinary day, the wind was bothering me, I'd tweaked my ankle right before the match.

You weren't lying in either case. It's just that your mind leaned, each time, toward the explanation more flattering to your self-image.

The sports pages, read closely

Psychologists In 1980, psychologists Richard Lau and Dan Russell analyzed hundreds of statements made by athletes and coaches, drawn from the sports pages of American newspapers, following baseball and football games. They classified each explanation as internal — having to do with the players, their preparation, their talent — or external — having to do with officiating, weather, bad luck, the opponent's form.

The result: winners made significantly more internal attributions than losers. Even in defeat, athletes often found a reason tied to themselves to explain the outcome — but far less often than in victory.

From the sports field to Monday morning's meeting

You don't need an official match to recognize the pattern.

A presentation at work that goes well is, in your mind, proof that you prepared thoroughly and know how to speak in public. A presentation that goes badly becomes, almost instantly, the fault of the broken projector, the inattentive audience, or the too-short time slot. A student who gets a high grade on an exam thinks about their own intelligence and the hours spent studying; the same student, on a low grade, finds the fault in unfair questions or a teacher who "doesn't explain things well."

It happened to me with an article I worked hard on and which, to my delight, did very well — and my first thought was that I'd finally found the right tone. With another article that went almost unnoticed, the first explanation that came to mind wasn't the tone or the topic, but the social media algorithm.

Why we prefer explanations that protect us

Part of the explanation has to do with the need to protect our self-esteem. Attributing success to yourself reinforces your sense of your own worth. Externalizing failure protects you from the much more painful conclusion that, perhaps, you're not good enough or well-prepared enough.

The pattern has a close relative in this series: the fundamental attribution error shows how we explain other people's behavior through character rather than context. The self-serving bias shifts that same question onto our own image: when the outcome is good, we become more receptive to explanations that give us the credit; when the outcome is bad, the context becomes more visible. The phenomenon is most evident when our own image is at stake, but it can also appear in the way we explain the successes and failures of the groups we identify with — a team, an organization, a community.

A bias with revealing exceptions

The pattern doesn't show up the same way everywhere, though. In a 1998 study, researchers found that pairs of friends, asked to work together on a task with a shared outcome, no longer showed the self-serving bias — instead, they made joint attributions, for both success and failure. Pairs of strangers placed in the same situation continued to claim credit or assign blame separately. At least in certain situations, the line between "my credit" and "your credit" seems to become less rigid once a relationship already exists between the two people.

Cultural differences complicate the picture too: in many studies, the bias shows up more strongly in Western, individualistic samples, and more weakly in some collectivistic cultures — suggesting that the way we learn to relate to the self and to the group also shapes how we distribute credit and blame.

Research on depression has brought an even more surprising nuance. Some studies have found that people with depressive symptoms show a reduced tendency to take credit for success and externalize failure. This gave rise to the controversial "depressive realism" hypothesis — the idea that, in certain situations, depressed individuals might make less self-flattering, and sometimes more accurate, evaluations of themselves. Later research has shown, however, that the phenomenon is far more complex, and doesn't simply mean that depression makes us see the world "more correctly."

Next time you succeed or fail

Next time you succeed, notice how quickly the explanation comes to mind, almost fully formed: talent, hard work, preparation. Next time you fail, notice the same speed, but in the opposite direction: circumstances, bad luck, people or things that didn't work out.

You don't need to eliminate this pattern entirely — that seems, in any case, nearly impossible. What's probably more useful is learning to recognize it. You can, at least now and then, ask yourself what you'd say about the situation if it had happened to someone else, not you.

Maybe we don't explain the world as it truly is, but in whatever way our minds allow us to remain, most of the time, the positive character in our own story.

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If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.

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The peak–end rule

Flow — the state where an activity absorbs you