Analysing your IQ
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AKA: "Credit Hoarding"
The tendency to attribute successes to your own abilities and efforts, but blame failures on external factors.
Self-Serving Bias affects everyone, including (especially) people who think they're immune. The first step to fixing it is understanding how it works.
You won because of skill; you lost because of bad luck, unfair conditions, or others' incompetence.
High-stakes domains (medicine, law, finance) have developed entire systems to counteract Self-Serving Bias. If professionals need safeguards, so do you.
This error is driven by Self-esteem protection: maintaining a positive self-image is psychologically valuable but distorts learning..
This bias exists because human brains evolved for survival, not accuracy. Self-esteem protection: maintaining a positive self-image is psychologically valuable but distorts learning. served our ancestors well. In modern contexts, it often misfires.
In investing: Self-Serving Bias leads to holding losing positions too long or selling winners too early.
In relationships: This bias causes people to interpret ambiguous signals in ways that confirm existing beliefs about partners.
In work: Self-Serving Bias makes it harder to update strategies when market conditions change.
In health: People ignore symptoms that contradict their self-image as "healthy" or "young."
Experiments on Self-Serving Bias often use controlled conditions that make the bias obvious to observers—yet participants still fall for it. This demonstrates how powerful the effect is.
Apply the same attribution logic to wins and losses. Ask: "If I flip the outcome, would my explanation change?"
Seek disconfirming evidence: Actively look for data that challenges your current belief.
Use decision journals: Write down predictions before outcomes are known, then review accuracy.
Consult diverse perspectives: People with different backgrounds spot different biases.
Implement decision rules: Pre-commit to criteria before emotionally charged situations arise.
Time-box decisions: Revisit important conclusions after a cooling-off period.
Some brains are more susceptible to this than others. Test your Emotional Health to find out.
The tendency to attribute successes to your own abilities and efforts, but blame failures on external factors.
The alternate name "Credit Hoarding" captures the intuitive essence of the bias. Self-Serving Bias is the formal psychological term, while "Credit Hoarding" describes what it feels like in practice.
Apply the same attribution logic to wins and losses. Ask: "If I flip the outcome, would my explanation change?"
The underlying mechanism is self-esteem protection: maintaining a positive self-image is psychologically valuable but distorts learning.. Human brains evolved heuristics for speed and survival, not accuracy in modern contexts.
Yes. Intelligence doesn't provide immunity—sometimes it makes the bias worse because smart people are better at rationalizing. Awareness and structured decision processes are more protective than raw IQ.
You won because of skill; you lost because of bad luck, unfair conditions, or others' incompetence.