Accepting Responsibility

Own up

My roommate wrote that and posted it on his blog. Good stuff. It reminds me of a chapter from The Legal Analyst that we read in Law College last semester. It talked about the self-serving bias, which basically is that when you would be better off if something were true, you're more likely to believe that it's true. This combines with something called attribution error, which is where we place too much blame or credit to either a person's inner qualities or their circumstances.

When our attribution error combines with our self-serving bias, it can lead to this lack of responsibility my roommate is talking about. When we do well on the test, we attribute it to our studying and our smarts, whereas if we do poorly it's because the teacher doesn't know how to write tests or because there was material on there that wasn't taught in class.

(And, yes, I think real attribution error says we attribute more to people and less to circumstances than we should, but it also talks about how we're less likely to do this with ourselves, and if you combine that with the self-serving bias it gets the same result either way).