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self esteem
You blame your failures on the world around you.
The self-serving bias refers to the tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to external ones.
Miller and Ross (1975) questioned the 'self-serving' nature of this bias, arguing that it may simply reflect that people expect to succeed and thus attribute unexpected failures to external causes.
You are a natural apologist for your own mistakes.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Miller and Ross, 1975, Psychological Bulletin
- What the check found
- The definition is standard in psychology, but the cited study itself was an investigation into whether the phenomenon is an artifact of expectations rather than a motivated defense mechanism.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.