What is it about?
It is well-established that people hold ‘self-servingly’ biased beliefs about their own personal traits and abilities that help bolster their self-esteem. A new study, published in the Economic Journal, has tested whether this phenomenon is linked to how we assess others. The study looked at the findings of an experiment involving 426 students. In the first part of the experiment they were asked to participate in a computerised quiz. In the second part they would be paired with either a human partner who completed the same quiz, or with a virtual robot. They received feedback on their team’s performance and asked to assess their own and their partner’s performance. In the third part of the experiment participants were given an opportunity to swap to a different, randomly selected partner before assessing their performance again, just as in the second part. The researchers found that when they were partnered with a person, participants tended to demonstrate self-serving biases. They gave more weight to positive than to negative feedback when assessing their own and their partner’s abilities and skills. This resulted in participants being more confident in their performance. But it also caused more mistakes as they turned out to be more hesitant to switch partners in part 3, even if those could have been potentially better skilled. By contrast, when they were partnered with a virtual robot, the participants took positive and negative feedback similarly into account when assessing their own performance and the robot’s skill. As a result, they held more accurate beliefs about their performance.
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Why is it important?
The research findings have a number of practical uses in the workplace, to help improve feedback and development for staff. The behaviour observed in the controlled settings of a lab can manifest in various aspects of our lives, from academic group projects to professional teamwork. You might find yourself overestimating a colleague's proficiency to justify delegating tasks, thereby avoiding the stress of extra work and the potential revelation of your own shortcomings.
Perspectives
Overconfidence seems to be less of a problem when employees co-produce with a robot or an AI tool. In such situations, individuals exhibit a greater capacity to integrate performance feedback and gain insights into their genuine abilities.
zahra murad
University of Portsmouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What to Blame? Self-Serving Attribution Bias with Multi-Dimensional Uncertainty, The Economic Journal, March 2024, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/ej/ueae005.
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