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Self-Serving Bias in Sports and Sex Differences

Self-serving bias is a key concept within social psychology, referring to the tendency for individuals to take personal responsibility for desirable outcomes and blame external factors for undesirable ones .

This mechanism protects and enhances self-esteem by attributing failures to the environment and successes to the individual . This phenomenon is commonly seen in sports and goal-oriented achievement, where situations could threaten self-esteem. Athletes often make both individual and team attributions, with individuals making attributions for team outcomes that reflects favourably on the group, this is known as team-serving bias . Positive outcomes are attributed to factors within the team, like team ability, and negative outcomes are attributed to external factors, such as bad luck .

There has been research into potential sex differences in self-serving bias, which is important in understanding how self-serving bias applies to sport, with key differences observed in female and male athletes . Societal expectations and socialisation play a key role in how female and male athletes exhibit self-serving attributions.

Research into the causes for self-serving bias has been divided, with research focusing on biological, cognitive, and motivational explanations. Previously, there was debate into which of these explanations is the main cause of self-serving bias, with researchers arguing if self-serving bias is a motivational process or rooted in cognition. However recently, researchers have rejected the idea of a single explanation, suggesting that biological mechanisms can explain the motivational and cognitive processes both underpin the mechanisms that drive self-serving bias .

Explanations for Self-Serving Bias

There are many potential causes and explanations for self-serving bias.

Cognitive-Driven Explanation

Flow-chart depicting the process of self-serving bias, in relation to the self-schema explanation during a negative outcome scenario.

Cognitive explanations suggest that self-serving attributions arise from the evaluation of evidence, arguing that self-serving bias reflects the judgments and attributions a person makes, and the way in which they process information.

The self-schema explains attributions as the cause of a person's positive expectations and self-schema consistency . A self-schema is based off internal beliefs about themselves and includes ideas about their skills and strengths. An individual's self-schema is likely to be an overly positive perception of themselves and results in the belief of being someone who creates positive outcomes . So, positive outcomes are consistent with an individual's sense of self and reinforces beliefs about being responsible for positive outcomes. With negative outcomes, the attribution of failures to external factors also aligns with a person's positive self-concept, and so reinforces the idea that their positive self-schema is accurate. In these instances, an individual assumes it is logical to believe that a negative outcome is externally caused, and a positive outcome is internally caused .

Research from Mezulis et al., (2004) provides evidence. This study suggests that people with negative self-views and self-schema are less likely to exhibit self-serving bias, finding overall positive feedback uncredible. This causes them to reject self-serving attributions . Overall, this shows evidence for self-schemas and cognition in explaining self-serving bias, as individuals make attributions on the basis of information processing.

Motivation-Driven Explanation

Some explanations suggest that motivational processes may cause self-serving biases. An example of a motivation-driven explanation is Self-Enhancement. This describes self-serving bias as a mechanism for preserving and boosting self-worth and is based on a desire to sustain a positive self-concept , which is suggested to be central in self-serving bias. Self-enhancement motivates an individual to make self-serving attributions for successful and positive outcomes, such as personal ability. This belief that a successful outcome is the result of an individual's actions enhances self-worth, whilst personal responsibility for failure undermines it . Evidence for the role of self-enhancement comes from cross-cultural research which shows differences in the extent to which to personal success and failed outcomes link to levels of self-worth. For example, those from Western cultures had a stronger increase in self-worth as a response to personal success than Eastern cultures . This is reflective of cultural differences in self-serving bias, with Western cultures displaying a stronger self-serving bias than those in Eastern cultures . This suggests an influence of self-enhancement and level of self-worth on self-serving bias. However, these findings may indicate a more complex mechanism underpinning self-serving bias. It may be that those in Eastern cultures exhibit a team-serving bias, where there is a desire to maintain a positive image of their group, rather than of the individual. This may mean that self-worth and self-enhancement doesn't work as a generalisable explanation to other cultures as it is an individualist approach.

Biological Explanation

Biological explanations aim to explore the neural processes that underpin self-serving bias, suggesting that it is an attributional shortcut with the adaptive function of simplifying the social world and enhancing self-esteem .

Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have found that multiple brain regions are implicated in self-serving bias, with different structures being associated with internal and external attributions. Blackwood et al., (2003) used fMRI, whilst participants made attributions for positive and negative social scenarios, to examine these neural correlates . Results showed that many regions of the brain were activated during attributions:

• Internal attributions activated regions in the left lateral cerebellar hemisphere, bilateral premotor cortex and right lingual gyrus.
• External attributions activated the left posterior superior temporal sulcus.
• During instances of self-serving bias, there was bilateral activation of the caudate nucleus.

Caudate nucleus (shown in red) is located in the Basal Ganglia and here is pictured in the skull.

Blackwood et al., (2003) concluded that these regions are implicated in self-serving bias. The caudate nucleus is part of the dorsal striatum and showed higher activation during self-serving attributions . These areas are located in the basal ganglia, which is involved in procedural learning and mediations of habit formation. Self-serving bias functions as a shortcut to simplify situations that involve complex social reasoning by attributing positive outcomes internally and negative outcomes externally . This process preserves self-esteem and minimises the distress that may be caused by responsibility for failures. This acts as motivation for self-serving bias. The caudate nucleus reinforces self-serving bias through associating self-serving attributions with the reward of maintaining a positive self-concept. The repetition of this embedded pattern of self-serving bias, creating a habitual response. This explains self-serving bias by suggesting that it is an adaptive and rewarding process .

The results from Blackwood et al., (2003) act as evidence for the biological explanation of self-serving bias by highlighting the neural mechanisms that are thought to be responsible for self-serving attributions . However, the activation of the caudate nucleus may explain motivation-driven causes, with the caudate nucleus' role in reward processing reinforcing self-enhancement motives and preserving self-esteem. Overall, this may mean that combining biological, motivational and cognitive explanations of self-serving bias may be the most beneficial method to gain insight into the inner mechanisms of self-serving bias and how this can be seen in real-world situations, such as sports.

Manifestations in Sport

It is important to understand how self-serving bias functions in real-life settings. Studying this phenomenon in sport settings allow for naturalistic investigations with meaningful outcomes. Using competitive sport environments allows for attributions to be examined in clear successful and failed outcomes .

Individual Sport

Researchers have studied self-serving bias in sport. Allen et al., (2020) used a meta-analysis to investigate how athletes attribute failure and success in individual settings. This study identified patterns in how individual competitive-sport athletes attribute success and failure, finding three attribution dimensions :

• Causality, where athletes attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors
• Cause stability, where success was attributed to stable causes, such as an enduring trait of the athletes and failures were attributed to unstable causes and transient circumstances like poor weather
• Perceived personal control, where success was attributed to controllable factors such as strategy and failure was believed to be the cause of factors outside of the athlete's control, for instance referee bias.

This analysis shows how in this real-life setting, self-serving bias operates uniquely in individual sports. This may be because of the responsibility that athletes bear for outcomes and so intensifying the need to protect self-esteem and an athlete's self-concept.

Further studies have also shown similar findings. Hyun et al., (2022) investigated the self-serving bias in performance appraisal of long-distance runners . Runners were found to be prone to over-reporting their performance when they failed to achieve their personal best, claiming that they achieve a faster self-reported finish time than the official competition time. Specifically, 18.2% of runners who failed to achieve their person best reported positively biased finished times, compared to 5.7% of runners who did achieve their personal best. Additionally, as the difference between actual and desired finish time increase, so did the likelihood of self-reporting a biased finish time .

The findings from both Allen et al., (2020) and Hyun et al., (2022) suggest that athletes used self-serving bias as a coping strategy to protect self-esteem when they failed to perform or meet personal goals.

However, other studies challenge self-serving bias in the causal attributions in individual sports. Melvin et al., (1984) found that both winners and loser did not significantly differ in terms of how they attribute cause for their outcomes, with both winners and losers attributing outcomes to internal causes . Although contemporary replications would be useful to strengthen this finding.

Team Sport

In team sports, individuals are likely to display team-serving bias where positive attributions are made to the team for successes and failures are attributed to external causes. This team-serving bias reflect both individual and collective mechanisms that maintain the group's cohesion and collective self-esteem . This is important in the application of sport by maintaining individual's belief in the ability of the team and its shared perception, and so improving overall performance.

One study, conducted by Greenlees et al., (2007), studied 528 participants who represented a range for interdependent team sports such as rugby, netball and basketball. The study found that members of successful teams attributed outcomes to more internal and stable causes than unsuccessful teams. Athletes used these attributions to enhance the value of their team, using attributions to internal and stable team-controllable factors, such as team strategy. However, successful teams were also found to attribute success to external factors like coaching, suggesting that team members have a greater recognition of external contributions. This is in contrast to what is typically suggested by self-serving bias. This study also suggests that overuse of team-serving bias can lead to complacency and avoidance of responsibility, which can influence the team's performance, as a whole, so research into team-serving bias may have implications in the understanding of self-serving bias . This is because findings from this study contradict what is typically seen from those with successful outcomes. Additionally, this can help coaching of teams to use attributions to enhance motivation and group cohesion.

Sex Differences of Self-Serving Bias in Sport

The role of sex and gender also has been shown to impact self-serving bias in sports, both individually and in teams. Greenlees et al., (2007) found that in team sports males consistently used internal and stable attributions regardless of whether the match was important, whereas female athletes only exhibited team-serving attributions in matches that they perceived as being important . Additionally, the meta-analysis by Allen et al., (2020) found that male athletes exhibited stronger self-serving biases across all attributional dimensions than female athletes, in individual sports . This finding is suggested to be due to status driven self-esteem concerns in males, due to men's culturally high status in society and specifically in sports.

This has wider implications into the differences that female and male athletes may need in training and coaching. These differences suggest that changing coaching techniques for balancing attribution based on sex may increase motivation and performance. Future research into this area could strive to look at coaching can influence self-serving attributions in male and female athletes, as an attempt to gain more insight into this area.