Page 195 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 177

Researchers have gathered a great deal of evidence in support of
the informal observation that we take credit for the good and deny
the bad. For example: (1) Students who do well on an exam tend to
attribute their performance to ability and effort, whereas those who
do poorly attribute it to an unfair exam or bad luck; (2) gamblers
perceive their successes as based on skill and their failures as a fluke;
(3) when married persons estimate how much of the housework
each routinely did, their combined total of housework performed
amounts to far more than 100 percent—in other words, each per-
son thinks he or she did a greater proportion of the work than their
partner thinks he or she did; (4) in general, people rate themselves
more positively than others do, believing that they themselves are
better than average; (5) two-person teams performing a skilled task
accept credit for the good scores but assign most of the blame for
the poor scores to their partner; and (6) when asked to explain why
someone else dislikes them, college students take little responsibil-
ity for themselves (i.e., they believe there must be something wrong
with the other person), but when told that someone else likes them,
the students attribute it to their own personality. 103 As Anthony
Greenwald and Steven Breckler note, “The presented self is (usu-
ally) too good to be true; the (too) good self is often genuinely be-
lieved.” 104 An interesting question is: Why do people engage in the
self-serving bias? One explanation that accounts for some of the
data is purely cognitive; individuals are aware of different informa-
tion as actors than as observers. 105 Consider the finding that cou-
ples’ estimation of their contribution to housework totals more than
100 percent. This effect could easily be due to differential attention
and memory. For example, every time I scrub the floor, clean the toi-
let, or wash the dishes, I am much more likely to keep track and re-
call my contributions than when you do it. It is very likely that I can
recall doing the dishes four times last week, taking out the trash,
cleaning up the garage, grooming the dog, and mowing the yard. I
recall that you cleaned the oven, but I missed (or forgot) the fact
that you cooked dinner and washed dishes on 3 nights, purchased
the groceries, vacuumed the rugs, trimmed the hedges, and paid the
bills. When I go to estimate the amount of housework each of us
does, of course, I think I do more.
But a purely cognitive-informational explanation cannot account
for all the examples of the self-serving bias.For example,the amount of
information available to successful and unsuccessful test takers and