You may recall that the process of making causal attributions is supposed to proceed in a careful, rational and even scientific manner. But this assumption turns out to be at least in part on through our attributions are sometimes a bias by effect. Although we would like to think that we are always rational and accurate in our attributions, we often tend to distort them to make us feel better self serving attributions are attributions that help us meet our desire to see ourselves positively. A particularly common example is a self serving bias, which is the tendency to attribute our successes to ourselves in our failures to others in this situation, we all make self enhancing attributions from time to time. If a teacher students do well on an exam, he may make a personal attribution for their successes Instead, it says I am after all agree future on the other hand when they do poorly in exam, the future We tend to make a situational attribution and blame them for their failure and say that why didn't you all study harder?

You can see that this process is clearly not the type of scientific, rational and careful process, that that attribution theory suggests that the feature should be following. It is unfair, although it does make him feel better about himself. If he really were acting like a scientist, however, he will determine ahead of time what causes gold or per exam scores and make the appropriate attribution regardless of the outcome. You might have noticed yourself making self serving attributions to perhaps you have blamed another driver for an accident accident that you were in or blame your partner rather than yourself for a breakup. Or perhaps you have taken credit for your successes, but don't blame your failures on external causes. If these judgments were somewhat less than cured, but the benefits you then they were indeed self serving.

Interestingly we do not, as often show these bias when making attributions about the successes and setbacks father's this tendency to make more charitable attributions about ourselves and then others about positive and negative outcomes often links to the actor observer difference that we mentioned earlier. It appears that the tendency to make external attributions about our own behavior and internal attributions about the conduct of others is particularly strong in situations where the behavior in most undesirable outcomes. So this was dramatically illustrated in some fascinating research by bonfire Scylla and workman in this study, the researchers analyzed and he accounts people he often experienced the indentify where the anger is somewhere else. It is when the were the prepper here have a behavior leading to an unpleasant outcome. Another one where someone else and for them, it has day work to beat them. The difference in attributions made in these two situations were considerable.

When accounting for themselves as perpetrators, people tend to emphasize situational factors to describe a behavior as an isolated incident that was a meaningful, understandable response to the situation, and to assert that the action caused no lasting harm. When they were victims. On the other hand, they explained the property or behavior by focusing on the perceived character defects of the person and by describing the behavior as an arbitrary and senseless action, taking Please eat an ongoing context of abusive behavior that cause lasting harm to them as victims. These sobering findings have some profound implications for money or social issues, including reconciliation between individuals and groups who have been in conflict in a more everyday We perhaps remind us of the need to try to extend the same understanding we give to ourselves in making sense of our behaviors to the people around us, in our communities. So many times in human history, we have failed to understand and even demonize other people because of those types of attributional biases.

Now, we have a question, why are these tasks having attributional biases so common one as for that we have already alluded to is that that they can help to maintain and enhance self esteem. Consistent with this idea is that there are some cross cultural differences are reflecting the different amounts of self enhancement that were discussed in previous sections. Specifically, self serving bias is less apparent in members of collectivistic than individualistic cultures. Another important reason is that when we make attributions, we are not only interested in causality, we are often interested in responsibility. Fincham and Jasper's argued that as well as acting like Li scientist hunting for the causes of behavior, we are also often acting to rule we totally are seeking to assign responsibility. We want to know not just why something happened, but also who is to blame.

Indeed, it is hard to make an attribution of cause without also making a claim about responsibility. What do we attribute someone's angry outbursts when internal factor like an aggressive personality, as opposed to an external cause, that is a stressful situation where implicitly or otherwise also placing more blame on that person into for marquees than either later seeing attribution as also being about responsibility shot some interesting pattern light on the self serving bias. Perhaps we make external attributions for failure partly because it is easier to blame others or or the situation than it is ourselves. individually. For three their account outlined by both parties so well and what maybe they were partly about either of sewing or assigning responsibility, respectively. Indeed, there are a number of other attributional biases.

They're also relevant to considerations of responsibility. It is to these this global health care