“If it weren’t for luck, I’d win every one”

Just as with motivated reasoning, our fielding errors aren’t random. They are, borrowing from behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “predictably irrational.” The way we field outcomes is predictably patterned: we take credit for the good stuff and blame the bad stuff on luck so it won’t be our fault. The result is that we don’t learn from experience well.

“Self-serving bias” is the term for this pattern. Psychologist Fritz Heider pioneered the study of how people make luck and skill attributions about the results of their own behavior. He said we study our outcomes like scientists, but like “naive scientists.” When we figure out why something happened, we look for a plausible reason—but one that also fits our wishes. In Heider’s words, “It is usually a reason that flatters us, puts us in a good light, and it is imbued with an added potency by the attribution.”

We attribute positive events to our own internal characteristics (“I’m really smart”; “I worked really hard”), while attributing negative events to external forces outside our control (“The test was unfair”; “My boss doesn’t like me”). The shorthand is “Heads, I’m right. Tails, I’m not wrong.” All of this stems from a fundamental need to protect our self-concept: we go to extreme lengths to justify anything that threatens the positive view we hold of ourselves. That’s the ego default at work.

Our capacity for self-deception has few boundaries. Look at the reasons people give on actual auto insurance forms: “I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.” “A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.” “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.” “An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.” “The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him.” “The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my car.”

Stanford law professor and social psychologist Robert MacCoun studied accident accounts and found that in 75% of them, victims blamed someone else for their injuries. In multiple-vehicle accidents, 91% of drivers blamed someone else. Most remarkably, in single-vehicle accidents, 37% of drivers still found a way to pin the blame on someone else. And we can’t write this off to a lack of self-knowledge by a few bad drivers. John von Neumann, considered a terror on the roads of Princeton, once offered this explanation after smashing his car: “I was proceeding down the road. The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 MPH. Suddenly, one of them stepped out in my path. Boom!” Et tu, JvN?

This predictable fielding error is probably the single most significant problem for poker players. I watched it firsthand with Nick the Greek at the Crystal Lounge. When he lost playing seven-deuce, it was because he got unlucky that time. When he won with those same cards, it was because his “surprise attack” plan was so brilliant. Off-loading losses to luck and onboarding wins to skill meant he persisted in overestimating the likelihood of winning with seven-deuce. He kept betting on a losing future.

The pattern isn’t limited to small-time players. Phil Hellmuth, the biggest winner in World Series of Poker history, famously fell prey to it. After being eliminated from a televised tournament, he said on camera, “If it weren’t for luck, I’d win every one.” The poker community gasped—he was effectively claiming that if luck were removed, his skill would guarantee victory every time. But the only difference between Phil and everyone else is that he said it out loud and on television. Most of us just keep the sentiment to ourselves, especially when the cameras and mics are on. Trust me, we are all vulnerable to the exact same thinking.

I, certainly, am not exempt. When I played poker, I did my share of taking credit for wins and complaining about bad luck when I lost. It’s a fundamental urge. I’ve been conscious of that tendency in all areas of my life. Remember, we can know it’s a visual illusion, but that doesn’t keep us from still seeing it.

Self-serving bias has immediate and obvious consequences for our ability to learn from experience. Blaming the bulk of our bad outcomes on luck means we miss opportunities to examine our decisions to see where we can do better. Taking credit for the good stuff means we often reinforce decisions that shouldn’t be reinforced and miss opportunities to see where we could have done better. To be sure, some of the bad stuff is mainly due to luck, and some of the good stuff is mainly due to skill. But it’s not true all the time. 100% of our bad outcomes aren’t because we got unlucky, and 100% of our good outcomes aren’t because we are so awesome. Yet that is how we process the future as it unfolds.

The pattern is everywhere. When Chris Christie participated in a debate before the Republican presidential primary in Iowa in early 2016, he attacked Hillary Clinton’s response to Benghazi: “She refuses to be held accountable for anything that goes wrong. If it had gone right, believe me, she would have been running around to be able to take credit for it.” Whether or not the accusation was correct, Christie got the human tendency right. Ironically, minutes earlier, he offered a pretty competitive example himself. When asked about Bridgegate, he answered, “Sure, because there’s been three different investigations that have proven that I knew nothing.” Then he added, “And let me tell you something else. I inherited a state in New Jersey that was downtrodden … and this year … New Jersey had the best year of job growth … in the last fifteen years. That’s because we’ve put conservative policies in place.” That’s a pretty fast pivot from “that bad outcome isn’t my fault” to “and let me tell you the good outcome I can take credit for.”

After I described this pattern at a meeting of trial lawyers, one attorney rushed to tell me about a senior partner he trained under. “If the witness helped our case, he would say, ‘You see how well I prepared that witness?’ If the witness hurt our case, he would tell me, ‘That guy refused to listen to me.’ It never varied.” Parents of school-aged children know this too. When my kids did poorly on a test, it was never because they didn’t study: “The teacher doesn’t like me. Everybody did poorly. The teacher put material on the test we didn’t cover. You can ask anyone!”

The same script plays out in organizations. You can hear it in workplace post-mortems: “It was a great idea, just poorly executed,” or “We never should’ve been in this situation in the first place.” Such statements insulate the ego but leave the underlying problem untouched. And this bias doesn’t only operate at the individual level—it shows up in groups, where teams collectively take credit for successes while blaming outside circumstances for failures.

If you get results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things: you were unlucky, or your ideas about how things work were wrong. If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should eventually lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, however, the world is telling you to update your understanding. But many people don’t want to hear that their ideas are wrong. Recognizing this is a blow to self-image—proof they’re not as smart or knowledgeable as they believed. That ego default feeds into the inertia default: changing what you believe about the world requires a lot of work, so people tend to ignore what the world is trying to tell them. They keep doing what they’ve always done and keep getting the same results.

Here’s the thing about all those self-serving explanations: even if they’re true, they don’t matter. Maybe it really wasn’t a bad idea, just bad execution. Maybe you really did the best you could. Maybe you never should have been in that situation in the first place. Unfortunately, no one cares. None of it changes the outcome or solves the problems that still remain. The only productive response is to own the result, learn from it, and update your mental models—regardless of how uncomfortable that feels. Accepting failure, and being open to the lessons it brings, is what ultimately helps us grow.

To see whether your thinking is wrong, you need to make it visible. Relying on memory won’t work because the ego distorts information to make us look better than we actually were. Self-serving bias is a deeply embedded and robust thinking pattern. Understanding why it emerges is the first step to developing practical strategies to improve our ability to learn from experience—strategies that encourage us to be more rational in fielding outcomes, fostering open-mindedness in considering all the possible causes, not just the ones that flatter us.