Where Two Strangers Never Meet: Self-Serving Bias

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two strangers just the same"

IF … Rudyard Kipling

Problematic Pronouns

We all probably know someone who believes that their successes are entirely down to their own levels of skill and whose failures are someone else’s fault.  To some extent most of us will meet them in the mirror each morning.  This is self-serving bias in action.  As Donelson Forsyth explains it:

“Those told they failed attribute performance to such external factors as bad luck, task difficulty, or the interference of others, and those told they succeeded point to the causal significance of such internal factors as ability and effort.”

Now, what do you think will happen to a corporation if you put someone with a bad case of self-serving bias in charge?  Beware the CEO with a bad case of the personal pronouns, that’s what I say. And let's not talk about global warming.

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Free Zeitgeist

As the Eurozone undergoes another trial by stupidity and markets edge ever higher in the face of uncertainty and confusion, my publisher has kindly put The Zeitgeist Investor on free offer for the weekend.  If any Kindle owners out there haven’t already picked up a copy now is the time to do so. Because, of course, there’s nothing new in the markets, it’s just that we don’t live long enough to remember.

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Curiouser and Curiouser: Incentives Through the Looking Glass

Demotivated by Design

The world is full of schemes aiming to incentivize us; we’re spurred on to achieve new targets and scale new heights by the carrot of lucre-based incentivization schemes designed to appeal to our selfish natures.  Which is not surprising because we live in a society characterised by a belief that we’re all out for what we can get, wheeling and dealing in our own self-interest, forever trying to get the maximum reward for the minimum effort.

Which is like determining that 5 is the square root of 17.  Anyone who truly believes that money is the main motivation for most of our behavior is someone whose belief system needs to be carefully inspected with one of those devices used for stirring septic tanks.  Worse still, financial incentive schemes may actually miss the point by undermining our most cherishable quality: curiosity makes the man, even if it flattens the feline.

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