Self-Serving Bias in English Learning: Student and Teacher Attributions, Study notes of Psychology

Download Self-Serving Bias in English Learning: Student and Teacher Attributions and more Study notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! Self-serving biases of students and teachers Hande Öztürk English Language Teaching Department, Maltepe University, TURKEY Introduction Research into self-serving biases of students and teachers has received considerable attention. Yet, this issue has not attracted the attention it deserves in the field of foreign language learning particularly in English-as-a-foreign- language contexts. This study aims to investigate whether students and their English language teachers at the preparatory school of a foundation university in Istanbul, Turkey have self-serving biases or not. Thus, it intends to question whether students and their teachers use the same language in terms of expressing success and failure or not. Theoretical framework Self-serving bias is one of the biases proposed by attribution theory. Thus, prior to defining what self-serving bias is, it would be beneficial to give information about attribution theory. This theory was originally born in psychology with the work of Heider (1958) but has been applied to an assorted array of social sciences. In its most common premises, it attempts to describe individuals ’ and groups’ causal explanations for events (Martiniko, 1995). According to attribution theory, each individual tries to understand himself/herself and his/her environment. Thus, s/he questions the reasons of her/his successes and failures as an attempt to have causal attributions related to these issues. Students and teachers are not exceptions. They, too, try to make sense of the nature of their learning and teaching environments, their own perceived abilities and the tasks and demanding situations that they are faced with (Bandura, 1997; Fraser, 1998; Williams & Burden, 1997). Attributions are an individual’s perceptions of causes of events and outcomes. A dimensional classification of success and failure attributions is established by Weiner. He claims that in both success and failure, individuals attribute their outcomes to four causes i.e., ability, effort, luck and the perceived difficulty of the task. 2 The essential development of attribution theory has been the exploration of attributional dimensions (Russell, McAuley & Tarico, 1987; Weiner, 1986). These dimensions are of high importance in terms of comprehending self-serving bias. It is suggested that each attribution has three properties. These are stability, controllability and locus of control. Stability questions the potential changeability of a cause over time. The further dimension, controllability represents the extent to which an event or outcome is under the control of the learner (Williams & Burden, 1999). Locus of control is the attributional dimension which is directly related to self-serving bias. It refers to how an individual perceives the causes of events. In terms of causality, Weiner classifies loci of control into two groups i.e., internal and external. This classification is based on the assumption that individuals tend to perceive the causes due to internal factors or external factors. Internal attributions are personal. The individual attributes the cause for his/her behavior to something internal to himself/herself such as ability, effort etc. External attributions are situational. The individual attributes the cause for his/her behavior to something external such as luck, the perceived difficulty of the task etc. Someone with internal locus of control would generally perceive himself/herself as responsible for his/her actions and their results. On the contrary, someone with external locus of control would be more likely to blame and in good results thank fate, luck, the task or some other source beyond his/her control. This line of argument is essential in comprehending self- serving bias. Self-serving bias can be defined as having a tendency to take credits for successes and deny the responsibility for failures. It is like seeing oneself in a better light. Self-serving bias involves two biases i.e. self-enhancing bias and self-protecting bias. The former refers to taking credit for the self and the latter refers to denying responsibility for failure. Within an attribution theory framework, it is having internal attributions for success and external attributions for failures (Bradley, 1978; Miller, 1975; Zuckerman, 1978). Self-serving bias in educational settings can be defined as the tendency for students and teachers to ascribe causes of success to internal factors and failure to external factors. 5 situations, the teacher group favored internal causality. Strikingly, with the instrument that investigated causal attributions related to educational settings, the teacher group favored external causality. Thus, as individuals participating teachers had internal causality in life. When it comes to the educational sphere, they showed external causality. Discussion The participating students showed an internal attribution in both success and failure outcomes. It may be argued that students take full responsibility in both success and failure outcomes. In the literature, it has been mentioned that when there is probability of improvement, people attribute failure outcomes internally. In hopeless situations, they tend to attribute failure externally. The internally attributed causality may be explained with a reference to individuals’ need to look good. Participating students may have desired to preserve their image. This is in line with the literature (Schunk, 1990). It may also be argued that teachers may have influenced the causal attributions of their students. The students may have inferred that since teachers were always expected to be successful then it must have been the underachiever to whom the problem was related. Teachers may have influenced students with suggestions about studying hard, having high aptitude and attending the class hours regularly. In such suggestions, the implied message is that success depends on the learner. The participating teachers tended to attribute success and failure situations externally without viewing themselves as responsible. It may be argued that once they consider success and failure results irrespective of themselves, they have no responsibility in the failure situations. This releases the tension of being an unsuccessful or insufficient teacher. The burden of being unsuccessful is supposed to be shouldered by the students. It would not be wrong to note here that external attribution was found in case of successes. Thus, in line with the self-serving bias, the teachers tended to leave the failures to their students but unlike the hypothesis they did not take credits for successes. They tend to depersonalize themselves from both of the outcomes and relate the outcomes- positive or negative- directly to their students. 6 Conclusion Studies like the present one show a growing interest in the label of self-serving bias. Self- serving biases are learned and thus there is possibility of change due to awareness raising. The findings of this study showed how important it is to have teacher training programmes that include detailed lecturing about self-serving bias. The findings of this study should be viewed in the light of its limitations. As in the case of most comparative studies in the field, it was difficult to draw strong generalizations due to the limited number of participants. 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