Self-Serving Biases

The ease of modern technology that lets people communicate globally, the access to extraordinary mobility, and the well roundedness of people today has produced the biggest population in history that prides itself in being egalitarian and fair-minded. Psychologists have found evidence in recent studies that, although people are not as outwardly racist and discriminatory as they were in the past centuries, there is an underlying bias that can lead people to act in ways opposing their beliefs. In their book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good people, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore the ideas of unconscious identity, the judgment and treatment of others based on stereotypes and the phenomenon of association, and our inability to simply stop being biased as opposed to outsmarting it.

A good supervisor seeks out the strengths in their employees and looks to manage weaknesses by identifying if they are in part of lack of training or poor interrelational communication between the manager and employee. Good supervisors seek out their employees’ success by focusing their attention on tasks they will exceed in and not basing their evaluation on tasks in which they struggle with weakness (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999). This notion presents an innovative idea in the way managers approach the work of their employees. It seems to be an effective way of evaluating an employee’s work based on a multitude of factors that can be contributing to it. It removes the blame from solely the employee which offers the opportunity to both the manager

In the 21st century, much of the racism in America is actually unconscious bias. However, the source of this unconscious bias is the media’s hidden agenda to make black people the target. This prompts law enforcements to focus more on black communities instead of the society as a whole. Furthermore, the lifestyle and psyche of African Americans have been injured through the consequences of other people. African Americans are being portrayed as criminals and thugs even though we know deep down humans are capable of unspeakable things.

One stage in the management of performance system is when managers evaluate employees’ performances and provide them with feedbacks. One of the purposes of this stage is to identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses. As a result, managers should be able to identify performance and training gaps.

Objective measures, such as turnover, sales, absences or production rates are often considered as better measures of job performance. Sadly these criterions also have their weaknesses, at least to some extent. A recurrent problem with these measures is that of criterion contamination. Simply put, even if the criterion in question is of central importance to the employer such as sales, there can be several different reasons for the individuals specific value in the criterion, for example leadership and environmental issues which effects the compared employees differently. There are possible efforts to be made trying to limit these factors influence’s on the results, with varying efficiency (Hammer & Landau, 1981;

Experts in the same discipline typically agree with one another as they have the same facts and knowledge. However, when experts disagree with one another in the same discipline, it may cause contradiction between experts. Disagreements come in many different forms such as different opinions, facts, how one perceive things and one’s standard of right or wrong. In certain disciplines, such as history and art are filled with a multitude of disagreement as the two area of discipline are bias and subjective. Thus, different experts may see things differently in one discipline which can also be called area of knowledge. In history, self-serving bias and historical revisionism can alter the interpretation of evidence and influence the perspective

arly childhood educators have deep faith in the principle that all people deserve the opportunities and resources to fulfill their complete humanity. Moreover, we have a unique role in making this principle real, in promoting all children’s chances to thrive and to succeed in school, in work, and in life. A basic principle in early childhood work is that when educators treat children as if they are strong, intelligent, and kind, children are far more likely to behave in strong, intelligent, kind ways. They are more likely to learn and thrive and succeed. Read more from Chapter 1 of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves.

Most of modern society thinks that politicians are corrupt, and filled with deceit and manipulation. The opinions of society occur in politics all the time such as in speeches, it’s what makes politics, peoples opinions. Opinions also carry down to news media presenting bias to the world as we know it, modern society interprets bias as to make an impact on politics and political events. Obama the Hamiltonian written by Matt Stoller contributor at Huffington post (article 1), and Empty Outrage written by Megan Carpentier contributing editor for opinion at U.S. news (article 2) both have difference in opinion and about the matter on hand. The topic presented in both article one and two states that former president Barak Obama recently accepted

There are many things that are wrong with the society that we live in. These things range from discrimination to sexism. These issues affect not only me, but most of the population. People are mistreated every day for unreasonable beliefs. In order to make sure that our next generation grows up in an equally treated society, we need to step up and correct the place we live in.

If a person takes credit for successful endeavors, yet denies having any involvement in ones that are not successful it can be said that they are display self-serving bias tendencies. This is because we tend to tell ourselves that when it comes to others, negative outcomes are a result of their actions and behavior. However, when the time comes to take responsibility for our own actions we blame external factors. For example, when two driver get into a car accident, both drivers are likely to see themselves as the victim, while blaming the opposite driver as the reason for the crash. The spotlight effect is when a person overestimates about the amount of attention they are drawing to themselves from others nearby. They believe that everyone

However, studies showed that children are more prone to exhibit self-serving bias (Jacobs, Lanza, Osgood, Eccles, & Wigfield, 2002; Plumert, 1995; Stipek, 1984; Stipek & MacIver, 1989). Shepperd et al. (2008) indicated that this is an effort to influence audience perceptions and or is a desperate act to defend one’s self-view, which were unconsciously and sincerely manifested to understand why a certain thing has happened. Mezulius, Abramson, Hyde, and Hankin (2004) also indicated that it is a normal, adaptive, and a widespread feature of human cognition. In addition, motivation-factors (self-enhancement and self-presentation) and cognitive factors are the causes that help an individual to manifest and exhibit self-serving bias.

Let's discuss some elements of the self-serving bias. First individuals often seem to have an unrealistic optimism. You can call this the "It won't happen to me" attitude. Optimism predisposes a positive approach to life. Sometimes this unrealistic optimism can make an individual seem larger than life. For example, students who are overconfident tend to under prepare. Another example of unrealistic optimism can be seem in newly weds. Most couples marry feeling confident of long term love when in reality half of all marriages fail. The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's opinions and one's undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors. When we behave badly or fail in a task we reassure ourselves by thinking that such mistakes are common. Individuals presume that others have the same

Biases are all around us. We a biased in almost everything we think, say and do because our implicit attitudes allow us to think a certain way, sometimes without even noticing. Biases are ways we unfairly respond to others and groups because of certain stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. One type of bias that we tend to express is when we are in a group, we tend to showcase intergroup bias; which involves how we view the group we’re a part of relative to other groups. Intergroup bias is when unfair responses are delivered toward another group to devalue or disadvantage them and its members (Dovidi & Gaertner, 2010, pg. 1084). Many times the explanation of intergroup bias is thinking of your group and another group as “we vs them.” This is like saying our group is good, theirs is bad; our group is better, theirs is worse, our group is right, their group is wrong; etc. The main basis behind this is social categorization.

As human beings, there is a need to have an explanation for anything such as, behavior of others or self, in order to make the world more foreseeable. But those explanations could involve bias and often incorrect. Two errors of attribution is the fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias. Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the tendency of an observer to overestimate the influence of personal dispositional factors and underestimate the influence of situational factors causes for behavior. And self-serving bias (SSB) is the tendency to attribute successes to personal disposition but attribute failures to situational factors. Knowledge of errors of attribution such as, FAE and SSB, were developed through two studies, The Power of Situations: Jonestown and the Fundamental Attribution Error conducted by Heidi R.Riggio and Amber L. Garcia and Attributions in the Sports Pages (1980) conducted by Richard R. Lau and Dan Russell. These two studies were important in establishing understanding of fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias.

Bias in the America has been no matter how you look at it since the pioneer time frame. Really or socially embraced advantages and rights were given to white Americans however denied to Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic and Latino Americans. European Americans ; particularly the well off white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were permitted specific advantages in issues of preparing, relocation, voting rights, citizenship, arrive acquiring, and criminal technique over time spans extending from the seventeenth century to the 1960s. In any case, non-Protestant pilgrims from Europe; particularly Irish people, Poles, and Italians, persevered through xenophobic preclusion and distinctive sorts of ethnicity-based isolation in American culture, were scrutinized as racially inferior, and were not considered totally white. Center Eastern American social events like Jews and Arabs have gone up against predictable isolation in the United States, and in this manner, a couple of individuals having a place with these get-togethers don't perceive as white. East and South Asians have in like manner went up against extremism in America.