Around The Globe

Attributions and Achievement

What happens to self-serving bias when it serves different selves? It still exists, but not always in the same form. Ng et al. (1995) compared the reasons that New Zealand European and Singapore Chinese university students gave for their success and failure on school exams. Both groups rated their own efforts as most important to success and failure. For the second most important factor, the New Zealanders followed the typical self-serving bias rankings, citing their ability as crucial to their successes and linking the exam's difficulty to their failures. The Singapore Chinese students, however, showed a completely different pattern. After effort, they rated luck and their study techniques as important to all exam performances. However, they cited luck twice as often for their successes as their failures. They ranked ability much lower and barely mentioned task difficulty at all. To explain these results, Ng et al. cited a "self-effacing" bias in Asian culture. In contrast to Westerners, Singapore Chinese students are more likely to accept personal responsibility for their failures and to attribute success to the situation or a group, a pattern that can help maintain social harmony.