The Self-Serving Bias in Attributions as a Coping Strategy

The present study suggests that American students tend to use an individual coping strategy (i.e., self-serving attributions) more than Japanese students do in dealing with success and failure experiences. However, this tendency was observed only on the ability-related dimensions of attention and memory. The patterns of attributions seem to suggest that on the other dimensions, the subjects' causal inferences about their task performance are relatively reason-able rather than self-serving. One possible interpretation of this finding is that different cultural groups have different ways of coping with such inherently ambiguous issues as a person's ability; but in the face of obvious situational information, their judgments converge, although they leave some differences due to cultural preferences.