TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Psychology > Self-attribution processes
The self serving bias - we tend to attribute the negative things that happen to us to external factors and the positive outcomes to dispositional factors.
Egocentricity - tendency to exaggerate the importance of our own role in shaping things - we each recall with a sort of selective memory.
Cognitive conservatism - others, not us have to change their position.
Self-handicapping - e.g. if a person consistently talks about the importance of doing well but inevitably behaves in such a way as to create unnecessary hurdles he/she is engaged in self-handicapping behaviour.
Ego states
Eric Berne was associated with transactional analysis which involves the structural analysis of personality:
- child ego state - contains all the impulses and behaviours that come naturally to a child / infant; contains the "recordings" of early life experiences and how we respond to them; two parts - the natural child - spontaneous and free; the adapted child - that part that has learned to do what others (usually parents) insist on.
- adult ego state - operates as a gatherer of information - organises, assimilates, seeks solutions to problems.
- parent ego state - attitudes, behaviours and values incorporated from other sources - again two sides - the critical parent - shows up when you are instructing others in what to do and how to do it; the nurturing parent - consoling, comforting or caring for another person.
There can be examples of imbalance: the constant child - who wants to be taken care of, babied, punished, rewarded; the constant parent - who often treats others as though they were children; the constant adult - who is concerned primarily with facts and information processing rather than feeling.
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