ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with systematic biases in attributions of responsibility that may be associated with such activities. It argues that allocations of responsibility for a group product tend to be self-centered: Individuals take more credit than other participants attribute to them. The participants in scientific disputes frequently attribute a divergence in opinion to their opponent’s malevolence. For a number of reasons, the availability of the person’s own inputs may be facilitated by differential encoding and storage of self-generated responses. The self-fulfilling prophecy interpretation implies: that players should be more optimistic about their own future performances than their teammates would be; and that players’ expectations should predict recall of their own performance, independently of their actual performance. A simple appreciation of the pervasiveness of the bias, and of one’s own susceptibility, may yield quite different attributions for its occurrence.
