Self-Serving Biases (3)

Question 1

self-serving bias

Answer 1

taking credit for success

• success is attributed to internal/ personal attribution
• failure is attributed to external causes/ situation

Question 2

why does self-serving bias happen?

Answer 2

• cognitive: people expect to succeed and tend to attribute internal causes to expected events
• motivational: people want to feel good about self

Question 3

self-fulfilling prophecy…how does it affect the self….how does it affect behavior?

Answer 3

• the process by which one person’s expectations about another become reality by eliciting behaviors that confirm the initial expectancies
• helps with self-verification

Question 4

confirmation bias…in what way can it be self-serving?

Answer 4

-the tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs

Question 5

confirmatory hypothesis testing… how can it be self-serving

Answer 5

fr

Question 6

self-serving schema

Answer 6

re

Question 7

3 main positive illusions

Answer 7

• I’m great:
• I’m in control:
• the future will be better:

Question 8

false uniqueness

Answer 8

the tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s characteristics

• one’s positive characteristics
• personally important characteristics

Question 9

false consensus

Answer 9

-the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s characteristics

• one’s negative characteristics
• (mostly) trivial opinions and attitudes

Question 10

illusion of control

Answer 10

-unrealistic perceptions of personal control over events

Question 11

results of the Langer studies

Answer 11

-t

Question 12

temporal self-appraisal theory

Answer 12

• notion of self over time as string of selves, with varying psychological closeness to present self
• we evaluate our past self in a way that makes us feel good about our current self

Question 13

temporal self-appraisal theory …how is it self-serving ?

Answer 13

-past selves serve as comparisons, to see whether objective improvement can occur or not

• promotes self-enhancement
• motivation in temporal-self comparisons

Question 14

Construal level theory

Answer 14

psychological distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms

Question 15

how does construal level theory affect our perceptions about the future and why

Answer 15

• predicts thinking concretely = we think more about the feasibility of an event (can we do it)
• predicts thinking abstractly = we think more about the desirability of an event (do we want to do it)