Selective Truth

Three jobs ago I met Albert. A man whose story changed with outcomes.

When projects succeeded, Albert materialized. He claimed the strategy. He recalled having selected the teams and tools. He owned the customer partnerships. Success had a hundred fathers, and Albert claimed to be most of them.

When projects failed, he blamed the rushed timeline set by engineering. He complained about the strategy set by peers. He recalled decisions made above him. Failure always landed on specific people or moments. And those were always outside his radius.

For many months I disliked Albert.

One afternoon, while sitting outside a glass conference room, I witnessed a conversation between him and his manager. She stood rigid in front of a presentation slide. Her hands cut through the air, sharp and deliberate. Pointing at numbers. Striking the table. Albert sat frozen. She leaned in. He leaned back. She questioned. He nodded without speaking. Again and again.

You see, Albert was under immense and constant pressure. And that, whether we admit it or not, changes something within all of us.

How do you tell the story of your failures?

Self-serving bias is the tendency to flip attribution depending on outcome. Success gets credited to internal factors like skill, vision and effort. Failure gets blamed on external factors like other people, circumstances and bad luck.

The asymmetry is revealed in sports. Research shows athletes consistently attribute wins more to personal factors and losses more to external ones. Although exact percentages vary across studies, the pattern holds across sports: victories are linked to ability and effort, losses to conditions, opponent advantages or officiating.

Marriage exposes the pattern at home. Researchers asked couples to estimate what percentage of household tasks they performed. The combined totals consistently exceeded 100 percent. Both partners genuinely believed they did more than half. People vividly remember taking out the garbage but barely notice when their partner does.

Corporate leaders demonstrate identical switching. CEOs credit company profits to strategic decisions and strong leadership. When profits decline, the same executives point to market conditions and regulatory changes. The pattern held across hundreds of companies and decades of data.

Brain imaging shows that success and failure are processed differently. During success, neural activity increases in regions linked to self-focused evaluation. During failure, activity shifts toward areas involved in interpreting context and external conditions. The story told later is not revision. The brain encoded the information that way. Memory recorded two different versions of the same event based on outcome.

Children demonstrate this flip early. Research shows self-serving attribution emerges in childhood and strengthens through adolescence. It is shaped by cognitive development and social learning.

The only population that escapes? People experiencing clinical depression. They tend to credit failures internally and successes externally. This pattern, sometimes called a depressive attributional style, is well documented. The bias exists to protect self-worth. When self-worth is already fractured, there is nothing to protect.

The switch happens so fast the contradiction goes unnoticed. It feels like accurate assessment, not self-protection. Where might you be doing this without knowing?

Self-serving bias is about self-defence. To understand what the bias is defending, try this:

Both will feel wrong. Your mind will insist the context mattered for failure, that your effort mattered for success. Keep writing anyway. The goal is discomfort because discomfort is diagnostic.

This is the place where the story you hold about yourself does not want to bend. If owning a failure feels unbearable, you are protecting competence. If attributing a success to others feels diminishing, you are protecting worth.

Once you can see what you are protecting, you can decide whether it needs protection. If it does, strengthen it deliberately. If it does not, release it and grow.

Self-serving bias hides the seams of your story by smoothing every explanation in your favour. As with Albert, the pattern only becomes visible when you see the tension underneath. The bias fills the space where self-worth feels threatened. Find what you are protecting, and the pattern will reveal itself.

Reading psychology makes you feel understood. This workbook makes you see yourself.

^{This publication is a space for exploration and reflection. Nothing in this email is medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. These ideas are general insights on human behaviour, not treatment or diagnosis. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional.}