In the Song Dynasty, there was a prime minister named Zhang Shangying. One of his hobbies was calligraphy. He especially liked writing cursive script. When he had nothing to do, he would pick up his pen and dance around for a while, feeling very proud. In fact, the prime minister's calligraphy was very poor and his handwriting was inappropriate. He also admired himself and thought that his calligraphy was quite accomplished.
At that time, many people laughed at him, but he didn't take it seriously. He still went his own way and wrote according to his old habits.
One day after dinner, Prime Minister Zhang took a short nap. He suddenly felt inspired to write poems and occasionally came up with a good sentence. He immediately asked the boy to grind ink and spread paper. Prime Minister Zhang picked up the pen and wrote quickly, and the paper was covered with dragon flying pieces. When a snake moves away, it is really difficult to recognize it. After Prime Minister Zhang finished writing, he shook his head proudly for a while, and seemed to still have some unfinished thoughts, so he called his nephew over to copy these verses.
However, Prime Minister Zhang’s nephew took a pen and paper and prepared to record the verses in small regular script. However, it took him a long time to identify a word. There were some parts that he really couldn’t understand, and he didn’t know where to stop. Just open it. He had no choice but to stop writing, hold the draft and ask Prime Minister Zhang.
However, at this time, Prime Minister Zhang took his masterpiece and looked at it carefully for a long time, but he could not identify it clearly. How could he not recognize the words he wrote? He felt quite helpless, so he scolded his nephew and said, "Why didn't you come and ask earlier? I also forgot what I wrote!"
< p>Zhang Shangying's IQ should not be low, otherwise he would not be able to become the prime minister. But why did he have such a low-level reaction that made others laugh at him?Most people would attribute the reason to the fact that "small officials talk small, big officials talk big" and think that Zhang Shangying is using his power to bully others. But in fact, from a psychological perspective, he just has a phenomenon called self-serving bias, which exists in more or less everyone.
The so-called self-serving bias refers to the tendency of people to overemphasize their contribution to success and minimize their responsibility for problems.
In life, the self-serving bias first manifests itself in attributing success to one's own efforts and denying one's own responsibility for failure, preventing us from objectively evaluating our own gains and losses.
Psychologist Weiner believes through research that self-serving bias is determined by a relatively stable attribution tendency formed by individuals over a long period of time. The attribution tendency generally includes three aspects:
First, internal and external causes. When individuals make attributions, they first pay attention to internal and external causes. Internal attribution refers to attributing the causes of behavior to internal factors within the individual, such as personality, quality, motivation, attitude, emotion, mood, effort level and other personal characteristics. External attribution refers to attributing the cause of behavior to external conditions, including background, opportunities, influence of others, difficulty of work tasks, etc.
In terms of internal and external factors, if success is attributed to internal factors, it will generate a sense of pride and thus improve motivation; if it is attributed to external factors, it will create a sense of luck. Attributing failure to internal factors creates feelings of shame: Attributing it to external factors. will get angry.
Second, stability and variability. There are stability factors and instability factors in both internal and external factors of behavior. For example, human emotions are changeable and unstable, but personality characteristics are not changeable and stable. Ability is also a relatively stable factor over a period of time. Among external conditions, the nature of work and task difficulty are relatively stable, while factors such as climate and opportunities are unstable.
In this regard, if success is attributed to stable factors, it will generate a sense of pride and thus improve motivation; if it is attributed to unstable factors, it will create a sense of luck. Attributing failure to stable factors will produce feelings of despair; attributing failure to unstable factors will produce anger.
Third, controllability. Whether an individual can control his or her behavior is called controllability. Individuals can change behavior and its consequences through effort, showing that it is controllable. Factors such as work difficulty and intelligence are uncontrollable.
If you attribute success to controllable factors, you will actively strive for success; if you attribute success to uncontrollable factors, there will not be much motivation. If you attribute failure to controllable factors, you will continue to work hard; if you attribute failure to uncontrollable factors, you will despair. The biggest problem is when attributing failure to something internal, stable, and uncontrollable, which creates a sense of learned helplessness.
It can be seen from the above analysis that for those who are accustomed to attributing internal, stable and controllable factors, the results of most things in personal life depend on the individual's efforts in doing these things. level, so they believe they can control the development and results of events. Such people have high achievement motivation, more self-responsibility and self-confidence in learning and work, they can constantly set higher goals for themselves, like to challenge in the face of difficulties, and are more persistent in the face of setbacks. They tend to attribute their success to their own abilities and efforts, and therefore show greater enthusiasm for learning and enthusiasm for work. and achieve achievement and progress.
In contrast, some people who are accustomed to attributing factors to external, variable and uncontrollable factors believe that most things in life turn out to be the result of various external forces beyond the individual's control. They believe that factors such as social arrangements, fate, and opportunity determine their own situation, and that individual efforts are useless in comparison.
Not only do they lack confidence in themselves and have a lot of anxiety, but they also lack interest in achievement activities. Even if the activities are successful, they tend to make external and unstable attributions. When faced with failures and setbacks, we often shirk responsibility for external factors and instead of looking for solutions, we try to seek help or try our luck like gambling.
Secondly, self-serving bias will manifest itself in communication by emphasizing one's own role and denying the role of others. Basically, almost everyone in the world has an overestimation of their own knowledge and abilities. This kind of blind self-confidence is rarely admitted, but it does exist among us, and it can also lead people to make wrong judgments about the external world.
The self-serving bias is most fully and typically manifested in the phenomenon of competing for credit at the end of some collaborative work. For example, in life, both husband and wife each think that they do more in housework. Research has found that each partner in a couple always believes that they bear more than 1/2 of the responsibility for some activities. These activities include who takes the initiative to chat with the other when they are alone to relieve loneliness, resolve conflicts, and be sensitive to the other's needs. Sex etc.
When we are watching a program, we are worried about missing programs on other channels, so we keep turning channels. As a result, we spent all our time choosing channels and were not able to enjoy any program as well as before.
A climber named Monkoff Kidd crossed the 6,500-meter mountaineering death line many times without an oxygen bottle, and finally climbed to the second highest peak in the world, K2. His feat was recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. It is indeed a severe challenge to climb a peak above 6,000 meters without relying on oxygen bottles. How did Kidd succeed?
Kidd’s answer is: “I think the biggest obstacle to anaerobic mountaineering is redundant thoughts, because on the top of the mountain, any small distracting thoughts will make you feel that you need more oxygen. As an anaerobic mountaineer, if you want to reach the top of the mountain, you must learn to eliminate distracting thoughts. The fewer distracting thoughts in your mind, the less oxygen you need. To get more oxygen to your limbs, you must learn to eliminate all unnecessary desires and distracting thoughts.”
The more desires, the more things are needed. You don’t need to go to K2 to experience this experience. And it feels very pleasant to constantly have matching things, but the consequences may not be wonderful, because we only care about the matching and ignore our original intention. The principle of "a good saddle goes with a good horse" is easy to understand, but it cannot withstand scrutiny, because a good saddle is easy to match, but it may be difficult to match a good rider and a good racecourse, and that is a kind of pain.
In this regard, perhaps we should know: Only when our own lives are simple can we become our own masters.