Explain how self-serving bias impacts our attributions about unexpected negative events
What will be an ideal response?
Answer:
When negative events occur, we attempt to attribute these negative events to external causes, rather than to blame ourselves. This is part of the self-serving bias which indicates we attribute positive outcomes internally and negative outcomes to external causes. Using the Ultimatum game, some researchers found that when receiving a negative outcome participants were more likely to believe they were playing with a human partner rather than a computer partner. Believing that there is an external causal agent creating this negative outcome allows participants to make an external attribution, "that person is being unfair." It is more difficult to believe that a mere machine could be responsible for the negative situation.
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In the U.S. the prevalence of personality disorders is estimated to be between:
(a) .1 and .5% (b) .5 and 2.5% (c) 2.5 and 5% (d) 5 and 10%
The fact that few people can accurately describe a penny even though they have handled thousands of them is an example of __________
a) encoding failure b) retroactive interference c) proactive interference d) elaboration failure