ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on research that related to the self-serving biasmaterial presented in connection with the concurrently assigned on social psychology. It illustrates the actor-observer effect, the false consensus bias, and priming effects. The presentation and discussion of particular attributional biases in introductory social psychology courses frequently engage student interest. Many students enter their first psychology course with "folk" theories of behavior, and they see psychology as simply intuitive and commonsensical. To help students appreciate the need for the scientific method in the study of behavior, teachers can discuss cognitive biases, such as the overconfidence phenomenon, the confirmation bias, and the hindsight bias. In various social and Clinical psychology courses, readings sometimes touch on the propensity of people to positively bias self-referential information. Some of the best discussions have been in my Social Psychology classes, due in part to the students' greater familiarity with models of self-presentation, self-justification, and information processing that may account for the findings.
