SELF-SERVING BIAS

In August of 2002, a lawsuit against McDonald’s was filed by parents of two girls. The girls, Jazlyn Bradley and Ashley Pelman, are 19 years old, 5 feet 6 inches tall, and pounds and 14 years old, 4 feet 10 inches tall, and 170 pounds, respectively. For her daily meal, Bradley ate McMuffin for breakfast and a Big Mac meal for dinner while Pelman ate Happy Meals, eating three or four times a week. According to Bradley’s father, Israel, the reason for filing the lawsuit was that McDonald’s never informed him about the food’s ingredients and so therefore, it has failed to warn consumers about health issues.

Self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal factors such as personality traits and their failures to external factors such as the situations. An example of self-serving bias is when a student does well on his exam, he will attribute his success of receiving a good grade to how smart he is. If he received a poor grade, however, then he would attribute his failure to receive a good grade to how the test was too hard or the professor does not teach properly.

The lawsuit filed against McDonald’s was an evidence of self-serving bias. Rather than blaming their own daughters’ failure to eat less junk food and more healthy food, the parents accused McDonald’s of causing their daughters to become obese. They blamed the obesity of their daughters to an external cause, McDonald’s.

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