Education
 

Egocentric bias

From Psychology Wiki

Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help

Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language
Personality | Philosophy | Research Methods | Social | Statistics

Social Psychology: Add · Specialist · Topics · Here


Egocentric bias occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.

Besides simply claiming credit for positive outcomes, which might simply be self-serving bias, people exhibiting egocentric bias also cite themselves as overly responsible for negative outcomes of group behavior as well (however this last attribute would seem to be lacking in megalomania).

This may be because our own actions are more "available" to us than the actions of others. See availability heuristic.

Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly first identified this cognitive bias.

See also: list of cognitive biases, attributional bias.

[edit] References

  • Ross, M. & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, 322-336.
Smallwikipedialogo.png This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Egocentric bias. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.