Quick Insight
Self-Attribution is the mental error where people tend to attribute successful outcomes from decisions to their own actions and bad outcomes to external factors.
Self-attribution is more commonly seen in
Important tasks
People with high self-esteem
People with a good prior record in a task
Competitive environments
Tasks that have delayed feedback
How does this play out in business? When CEOs or companies have success with their first acquisition, they:
Attribute too much of the success to their own actions
Become overconfident
They then proceed to destroy value by engaging in more acquisitions
If your vision is clouded by self-attribution, you can’t tell if past decisions were good or just lucky. You can’t learn from past decisions and strategies. So, you make the same decisions in the future. You may then learn a very expensive lesson. With severe self-attribution, you keep paying for the lesson but never learn from it.
Humility may be healthy for your bottom line.
- Rob Stephens
Founder of CFO Perspective and the Finance and Strategy Toolkit (FAST)
CFO Perspective Resources
Further Insight
- Why We Blame Others by Ciitron Hennessey Therapy