A statistical review of the literature

concerning the self-serving

attribution bias in interpersonal
influence situations^
Robert Arkin, Harris Cooper, and Thomas Kolditz,
University of Missouri

Abstract

Based upon his review of the self-serving attribution bias literature,

Zuckerman (1979) concluded that research employing an interpersonal
influence setting was less likely than other research paradigms to produce
significant differences in self-attribution for success and failure. A survey
of the research reviewed by Zuckerman as well as a more current survey
of the relevant literature were undertaken. Statistical combinations of
these two sets of evidence revealed Zuckerman's assessment may have
been too conservative, at least with respect to two of three experimental
paradigms. Additionally, a general tendency of individuals to assume more
personal responsibility for success than failure on interpersonal influence
tasks was found in the more comprehensive survey. Finally, the evidence
concerning interactions of performance outcome with either contextual
variables or individual differences indicated that the self-serving bias may
be stronger under certain conditions than others and for certain types of
individuals. Discussion centered on the conceptual distinctions between
interpersonal influence and other achievement settings.

Zuckerman (1979) has recently reviewed research addressing

what is commonly called the self-serving attribution bias, or the
tendency of individuals to assume greater personal responsibility
for success than failure outcomes. Zuckerman concluded that some
research paradigms are less likely than others to uncover this ten-
dency in self-attributions. Specifically, it was argued that research
employing an interpersonal influence setting, in which one person

1. The present research was facilitated by grants from the National Institute of
Mental Health (1R08 31910) to Robert Arkin and from the National Science Foun-
dation (BNS78-08834) to Harris Cooper, Principal Investigator. Funds for the on-
line computer search were provided by the Center for Research in Social Behavior.
Special thanks are extended to Miron Zuckerman for critical comments on an earlier
draft and for providing statistical information on several of the included studies.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert Arkin, Department of Psychology,
210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.
Journal of Personality 48:4, December, 1980. Copyright© 1980 by Duke University
Press.
436 Arkin et al.

attempts to alter another person's behavior or outcomes, has not

reliably produced significant differences in self-attributions for suc-
cess versus failure. Taking this conclusion as given, Zuckerman
proposed several reasons why the self-serving bias should not
emerge in the interpersonal infiuence context. It was our impres-
sion that the null-effect appraisal of this literature may have been
overly conservative.
The typical "box score" technique for analyzing a series of stud-
ies (trichotomizing studies into those with positive, negative, and
null effects) used by Zuckerman neglects important information in
many research reports, and improperly weights study results in that
specific probabilities associated with individual studies are not tak-
en into account (Cooper & Rosenthal, 1980). To remedy this diffi-
culty, a statistical combination of interpersonal infiuence self-serv-
ing attribution bias research was conducted. To facilitate
comparison, this statistical combination of study results was per-
formed for the entire set of relevant studies (including those con-
ducted since the earlier review) as well as for those studies cited
in the earlier review taken alone.
A Categorization of Interpersonal Influence Paradigms
Zuckerman categorized the relevant evidence into three groups.
First, five studies using variations on teacher-student exchanges
(in which an actual or role-playing teacher attempted to instruct an
actual or role-playing student) were reviewed. In these studies the
dependent variable involved the "teacher's" assessment of the ex-
tent to which his or her contribution influenced the student's suc-
cessful or unsuccessful absorbtion of the material. Second, four
studies examined a client-therapist interaction. In these studies an
individual playing the role of a therapist attempted to help another
individual (actually an experimental confederate) cope with an ir-
rational fear. The assistance proved either helpful or not helpful.
The "therapist" was then asked to assess the extent of his/her con-
tribution to the "client's" acquisition (or failure to acquire) greater
self-control. Finally, four studies with less clearly related proce-
dures were grouped. In these studies, the subject either provided
advice on some judgment task, gave instructions on how to construct
a diagram, or attempted to change the other's attitude. The per-
ceived extent of the infiuencer's contribution (either successful or
unsuccessful) was then assessed. The three groups of studies were
treated in the same section of Zuckerman's paper because they
shared the following attributes: (1) all required subjects to attempt
inducing a change in a target person's behavior or outcomes; (2) all
placed subjects in a position of power (i.e., therapist, teacher) and
confronted them with a weak or helpless other; and (3) all required
The self-serving bias 437

subjects to assess both their own and the target person's contri-
bution to the influence attempt.

Review Procedures
Though perfect retrieval procedures are, of course, not available,
it is important to state how relevant studies were located, acknowl-
edging the possibility that a biased sample of studies could be
reviewed. Tests of the hypothesis that people assume more per-
sonal responsibility for success than failure on interpersonal influ-
ence tasks were located through (a) Zuckerman (1979); (b) informal
channels or personal involvement; (c) the Psychological Abstracts
between the years 1970 and 1978; and (d) an on-line computer
search. The computer search uncovered over 340 investigations
possessing the keywords: (a) self-serving bias; (b) ego-serving bias;
(c) egocentric bias; (d) teacher-student; (e) client-therapist; (f) in-
terpersonal influence; and (g) a crossing of the word attribution
with the words success, failure, performance, outcome, and ac-
tor's. Titles were judged for potential relevance by the investi-
gators. Ultimately 59 studies were examined directly in the Uni-
versity library.

A Meta-Analysis of Self-Serving Bias Studies

The retrieval procedures uncovered 22 pertinent manuscripts, 18
from professional journals and 4 from Dissertation Abstracts In-
ternational (see Table 1). One study (Arkin, Appelman, & Burger,
1980) contained two relevant hypothesis tests. Of the eight reports
that did not appear in the earlier review, five were available before
the review appeared. Of these, two had been excluded on concep-
tual grounds (Stephan, 1975; Wells et al., 1977; see discussion).
Teacher-student studies were conducted in six separate labora-
tories, client-therapist studies in four laboratories, and miscella-
neous studies in seven laboratories. The retrieved studies gener-
ated 23 tests of the self-serving bias main effect and 60 tests of
whether bias appeared only under some conditions.
Results
Before analysis of the studies began, several conventions were
adopted concerning how test values would be handled: (a) studies
that reported nonsignificant effects and no accompanying statistics
were treated as revealing exactly equal success and failure means;^
(b) no study was allowed to contribute a p value below .001 (two-

2. Although not originally reported because of space limitations, the main effect
hypothesis test of Arkin et al. (1979) was retrieved.
438

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440 Arkin et al.

tailed) and; (c) two studies (Beckman, 1970; 1973) reporting nearly
equivalent but opposite effects and no useable statistics were each
entered as exact nullfindings.^These conventions either have no
appreciable effects or tend to support the null hypothesis.
Four statistics were generated to describe the literature (cf. Coo-
per, 1979). Each was calculated for the entire set of studies ap-
pearing in Table 1 and also for just those cited in the earlier review.
An overall probability (Zma) was generated for the set of studies
without regard to experimental paradigm. This probability was cal-
culated by (a) finding the normal deviate (Z) associated with each
test's p level, and (b) dividing their sum by the square root of the
number of studies involved (cf. Mosteller & Bush, 1954). For the
earlier review's 13 tests, the Zma was nonsignificant (1.24, p < .22,
two-tailed). However, the entire body of 23 tests revealed a highly
significant Zma (4.81, p < .0001). A fail-safe N (Nfs.os) of 174 was
found for the 23-study run. This statistic is the number of null-
summing studies needed to raise the series' probability above
p < .05. No fail-safe N was calculated for the earlier review since
this run did not reach significance.^
A measure of effect size, d, was calculated for each study. The
d index describes, in standard deviation units, the distance be-
tween the success and failure means.^ For the previously reviewed
studies a d index of .15 was found. A d index of this size indicates
that the average member of a success condition took more personal
responsibility for the outcome than 56% (= U^; see Cohen, 1977)
of the people in failure conditions. For the total run of 23 studies,
d equaled .38, meaning average success subjects attributed out-
comes more to self-causation than 64% of the failure subjects.
Separate analyses of the three research paradigms revealed the

3. The two studies by Beckman (1970; 1973) were eliminated (assigned Z scores
of zero) because the chi square tests reported in each (all other studies used analysis
of variance) failed to include the appropriate comparisons. In both cases all com-
parisons reported were between actor-observer, or self-other, rather than within
self-attribution alone, rendering interpretation problematic (Arkin, Gabrenya, &
McGarvey, 1978). Additionally, only a subset of the relevant conditions were in-
cluded in the comparisons. Since (a) inspection of the means of subjects' self-attri-
butions revealed that they were in opposing directions (with one study appearing
to support the self-serving bias hypothesis and one study apparently uncovering a
reversal of this effect), and (b) the mean differences were roughly comparable in
magnitude, the entry of each as null findings seemed a proper representation.
4. No test employing a weighting of studies by number of subjects was performed.
The 22 investigations contained samples of a fairly similar size (see Table 1).
5. The d indices were estimated using a slight modification (i.e., d = 2f ^ ^ o f
the Friedman (1968) formula. The d index assumes an equal standard deviation
within the success and failure groups.
The self-serving bias 441

overall conclusions were not applicable to all subareas. For the

teacher-student_paradigm, both the earlier reviewed studies
(Zma = -1.47; d = -.23) and the total series (Zma = .92, p < .36;
5 = .06, Us = 52%) produced nonsignificant combined effects.^
More notably, this subarea evidenced what has been identified as
a truly inconsistent set of results. That is, self-serving bias studies
using the teacher-student paradigm have produced "large" effects
in both the self-serving and counterdefensive direction. Such re-
sults suggest undiscovered underlying interactions (cf Cooper,
1979).
The client-therapist paradigm produced a significant series of
results for both the earlier review (Zma = 2.12, p < .04, Npg.os =
3) and the more recent review {Zma = 3.93, p < .0001, Nps.ns =
33). The effect-size estimate in the earlier review was similar (d =
.56), though smaller, than that of the newer review (d = .74). In
the earlier review (of four studies) an average successful subject
took more personal responsibility for the outcome than 71% of the
failure subjects, while 77% of the failure subjects were surpassed
in the seven-study analysis.
The miscellaneous paradigm produced a trend for the earlier
reviewed studies {Zma = 1.75, p < .08) and strong significance for
the total of seven studies (Zma = 3.56, p < .0001; Nfg.oi = 30). The
difference is mainly attributable to two studies excluded from the
earlier review on conceptual grounds. The effect size for the earlier
review was small {d = .22, U3 = 59%), while in the more recent
review the effect was moderate-sized (d = .38, t/3 = 64%).
In sum, two conclusions from the earlier review were confirmed:
there was no support for the self-serving bias when the studies
were considered as a whole, or when the teacher-student paradigm
was analyzed separately. However, more support for the self-serv-
ing bias was present in the client-therapist paradigm than the ear-
lier review may have recognized. The appropriateness of the ear-
lier conclusion concerning the miscellaneous paradigms rests
largely on a conceptual issue. Over all paradigms, the inclusion of

6. The exact value available for the disconfirming effect found in Ames (1975)
did not appear in the abstract of Ames (1973) used in the earlier review. The exact
value was used in the teacher-student and overall analyses anyway. Also, two dis-
sertations (Mayhew, 1972; Quirk, 1967) were not included in the meta-analysis,
though their results can be viewed as supporting the self-serving bias. The elimi-
nation of the Quirk and Mayhew dissertations was based upon their use of evalu-
ations of ratings (Zuckerman, 1979, p. 254) as dependent measures rather than the
more appropriate attributional ratings.
442 Arkin et al.

Table 2. Hypothesis tests concerning the interaction of influence-

attempt outcome with other experimental factors.

P d
Author level index Interacting variable(s)

Teacher-student paradigm
Beers (1975) — — perceived seif-effort
Ross etal. (1974) .001 .91 roie piayer/real teacher
Beckman (1976) — — participant/observer

Client-therapist paradigm
Weary (1980) .04 .55 pubiicity
Harvey et al. (1974) .02 .72 expected outcome
Arkin et ai. (1979) .03 .55 anticipated evaluation
and self-monitoring
Arkin (Exp. 1) et al. (1980) .02 .57 anticipated evaluation
and sociai anxiety
Federoff & Harvey (1976) .001 1.42 objective seif-awareness

Misceiianeous paradigms
Schopier & Layton (1972) .01 .87 ability of target person
Arkin(Exp. 2)etal. (1980) .01 .96 social anxiety
Arkin(Exp. 2)etai. (1980) .05 .48 measurement technique
Mynatt & Sherman (1975) .05 .74 group/alone
Krussell (1974) .001 1.14 sex
Krussell (1974) .001 .73 fear of success

Note.—A total of 59 interactions were tested.

the newer evidence increased confidence that the self-serving bias

existed, though teacher-student results remained inconsistent.'
Finally, Table 2 presents the 14 instances in which outcome was
reported to have interacted with another experimental variable.
Since 59 total interactions were tested, two or three would be ex-
pected to be significant by chance alone. Eight interactions in-
volved another contextual variable (i.e., public versus private set-
ting, ability of target person), suggesting that the self-serving bias
may be stronger under some conditions than others. Six interac-
tions involved individual difference measures (i.e., self-monitor-

7. Some authors have contended that the self-serving attribution bias might only
appear in experiments involving comparisons of increasing success with constant
failure. This possibility was tested. The six studies which compared increasing
success with constant failure (Beckman, 1970; Beers, 1975; Johnson, Feigenbaum,
& Weiby, 1964; Rizley, 1978; Schopler & Layton, 1972) produced evidence of a
self-serving bias (Zma = 2.45, p < .02; Nfs.os = 6; J = .27, U, = 60%). However,
the 17 remaining experiments comparing constant success with constant failure
revealed even stronger bias-supporting evidence (Zma = 4.24, p < .0001; NFS m =
96; 3 = .42, 1/3 = 66%).
The self-serving bias 443

ing, social anxiety), indicating that certain types of people display

the self-serving bias to a greater extent than others.
Discussion
The present findings reveal a clear tendency of individuals to
assume more personal responsibility for success than failure within
the general domain of interpersonal influence contexts. However,
it was the evidence from the client-therapist paradigm and the mis-
cellaneous array of interpersonal influence tasks that produced this
result; the findings from studies using the teacher-student para-
digm proved inconsistent across studies. Comparisons of the re-
search reviewed here with that in the earlier paper revealed that
Zuckerman's assessment of the literature was not entirely unwar-
ranted. A statistical combination of the research included in the
earlier review revealed no support for the self-serving attribution
bias in the interpersonal influence studies taken as a whole or when
only the studies in the teacher-student paradigm were analyzed.
However, more support for the self-serving attribution bias in the
client-therapist paradigm emerged than was acknowledged in the
earlier review. The additional evidence in the present review did
not change these conclusions regarding the teacher-student and
client-therapist paradigms, although support for the existence of
the self-serving attribution bias across paradigms was enhanced.
Support for the self-serving attribution bias among the miscella-
neous studies cited in the earlier review was marginal, making a
confident appraisal of these studies problematic. It is the case that
the additional evidence, part of which was (Stephan, 1975; Wells
et al., 1977) or would have been (Arkin et al., 1980, Exp. 2) ex-
cluded by Zuckerman, lent support to the existence of the effect in
the miscellaneous grouping of studies.
Our decision to include the three additional studies in the mis-
cellaneous category warrants some comment. Each of the experi-
ments involves an actor's attributions for his or her helping behav-
ior. Helping an individual perform a task (a manual dexterity task,
searching for a contact lens, etc.) is certainly one way to influence
another, not conceptually different from helping someone to learn
a list of words or to apply a therapeutic technique to a problem.
And, as with the remaining interpersonal influence research, it is
the joint effort of the actor and target person that is or is not suc-
cessful. Moreover, these three studies all contain the unique fea-
tures of interpersonal influence contexts cited by Zuckerman
(1979): (1) subjects participated in an actor-observer setting and
were in a position of power relative to the target person (controlling
the pace of the task, for example); (2) subjects were implicitly or
444 Arkin et al.

explicitly making attributions that could be compared with the

impressions of the target person; and (3) subjects were making
judgments about themselves from the perspective of an actor and
judgments about the target person from the perspective of an ob-
server. The dependent measures in these helping studies may be
phrased in terms of the subject's own negative or positive behavior
(helping versus not helping), making these studies appear to in-
volve something more like an achievement context (Zuckerman,
1979). However, it is still the joint outcome achieved by the actor
and target person that is being attributed by subjects, qualifying
these studies for inclusion with other interpersonal influence re-
search.
Zuckerman's Explanations for the Null Result
Zuckerman (1979) proposed two reasons why the interpersonal
influence context could fail to uncover what he found to be such
a robust finding in other situations. Since these observations about
the interpersonal influence context were intended to explain a null
result, it seems important to reassess the potential impact of these
factors in light of the evidence presented in this review. It should
be noted, however, that the factors cited by Zuckerman could still
attenuate the self-serving bias in the interpersonal influence con-
text, relative to other contexts. Therefore, Zuckerman's observa-
tions about the literature are by no means ruled out by the more
positive effects uncovered by the present review.
First, it was argued that subjects in these studies might be un-
likely to make self-serving judgments because they would identify
with the person they were attempting to influence. Such identifi-
cation might lead them to feel reluctant to take advantage of their
position of power. Subjects in these studies were often asked to
assess both their own responsibility and that of the target person
for the outcome in question. Zuckerman (1979) argued that these
two assessments made by a common rater are not independent:
"After all, if the teacher assumes credit for success, he denies it
from his student; and if the therapist denies his responsibility for
failure, he puts the blame on his client" (p. 249). However, the
assumption that self-attribution and other-attribution are necessar-
ily inversely related seems questionable. People can attribute out-
comes to a host of causes other than themselves or the other. To
take an example, the subject role-playing an unsuccessful therapist
could point to the therapeutic style, to the limited amount of time,
the experimental setting, or many other plausible causes, aside
from the client, or themselves. In the case of success, both self and
other can be viewed as substantially personally responsible for the
The self-serving bias 445

positive outcome; a unique teacher-student fit, for example, could

be viewed as the cause of their joint outcome. In general, the idea
that personal and situational attribution are inversely related (or
should be) is not supported by the literature (e.g., Solomon, 1978).
In sum, then, although identification with the other may well have
affected subjects' attributions about the other (e.g., Arkin, Gabren-
ya, & McGarvey, 1978; Gould & Sigall, 1977), it is not clear that
this identification process would affect subjects' self-attribution.
Moreover, the evidence presented in this article shows that even
if this identification process were present it was not substantial
enough to eliminate or reverse the self-serving bias effect.
Zuckerman (1979) also argued that a combination of the actor-
observer effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1971) and differential sensitivity
to cooccurrence of responses and positive or negative outcomes
(Miller & Ross, 1975) could preclude finding the self-serving bias.
The basis of this argument was that, as actors, subjects in these
studies would have focused their attention largely upon the envi-
ronment, including, of course, the target person. As a consequence,
the tendency to perceive cooccurrence of responses and successes
and ignore cooccurrence of responses and failures (Miller & Ross,
1975) would be more true of perception of the other than of the
actor's own perception of self. This effect, if present, could lead
subjects to overattribute success to the other while ignoring the
other's role in failures, leading to an attenuation of the self-serving
bias in subjects' self-attributions. Again, however, there is no rea-
son to believe that self- and other-attributions are inversely related.
One psychological process (say, an informational orientation) could
apply to other-attribution at the same time a different process (say,
motivational) would apply to self-attribution. Regardless, the evi-
dence presented above demonstrates that the presence of another
who could be viewed as partly responsible for an outcome does
not eliminate the self-serving bias, although the presence of others
could attenuate the effect.

Explanations for the Teacher-Student Paradigm Result

The truly inconsistent findings in the teacher-student paradigm
may be attributable to the influence of some moderating variable
distinguishing some studies from others. This interactive variable
may produce what Bradley (1978) has referred to as "counter-de-
fensive" attribution, or reversals of the self-serving bias, in a sub-
sample of the studies. For example, Bradley (1978) and Zuckerman
(1979) both noted that Beckman (1973) and Ross, Bierbrauer, and
Polly (1974) used procedures that could imply to the subject that
his or her attributional judgments would be compared to those of
446 Arkin et ai.

an objective observer, presenting the possibility that an overly

boastful or egotistic self-appraisal would prove embarrassing. This
could have caused their subjects to make modest, or counterdefen-
sive, appraisals of their personal responsibility in order to facilitate
presenting themselves to the observer and experimenter in a fa-
vorable light (Bradley, 1978). The presence of an evaluative ob-
server, then, seemed a plausible reason for counterdefensive attri-
bution in some teacher-student studies (Bradley, 1978; Zuckerman,
1979). However, the present review uncovered two additional
teacher-student studies revealing no self-serving bias or a reversal
of the self-serving bias (Ames, 1975; Beers, 1976) that did not share
this methodological feature with Beckman (1973) and Ross et al.
(1974), as well as one teacher-student study uncovering the self-
serving bias (Beckman, 1976) that did. This renders the earlier in-
terpretations of the divergent effects in the teacher-student para-
digm less plausible. Some subtle, still unrecognized, feature of this
research may yet account for the truly inconsistent findings. For
instance, systematic elimination of the self-serving attribution bias
has been found under conditions of intense scrutiny of subjects'
attributional responses by observers (Arkin et al., 1979; 1980; Wells
et al., 1977). However, this effect seems restricted to only certain
types of persons under certain conditions (Arkin et al., 1979; 1980).
Thus some individual difference or contextual factor, in combina-
tion with the presence or absence of an evaluative observer, may
account for the inconsistent findings.
Interactive Variables
Although the main effect of outcome was clearly present in the
interpersonal infiuence research, at least with respect to two of
three experimental paradigms, there also emerged a large number
of interactions of outcome with other relevant variables. This find-
ing indicates that the self-serving attribution bias occurs only in
some settings and only for some types of persons. The purpose of
the present article was solely to document that individuals do tend
to assume more personal responsibility for success than failure in
the interpersonal infiuence context. Obviously, interpretation of
the self-serving bias depends upon a consideration of the condi-
tions under which the self-serving bias and counterdefensive attri-
bution obtain. However, as Zuckerman (1979, p. 248) noted, "The
question of how to interpret the self-serving bias effect is moot
. . . (if) there is no clear evidence that such an effect exists." In
light of the evidence reviewed here, it appears that continued in-
vestigation of the determinants of the self-serving bias in interper-
sonal influence contexts, as well as other contexts, would be fruit-
The self-serving bias 447

ful. Interested readers are directed to recent interpretive reviews

(Bradley, 1978; Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfield, 1978; Weary-Brad-
ley & Arkin, in press; Zuckerman, 1979).

References
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Manuscript received August 6, 1979; revised December 3, 1979.