Self-serving bias

Biological Parallel

Sticklebacks with dull breeding coloration attempt courtship but fail. The successful strategy isn't accepting dispositional inadequacy—that would trigger withdrawal from mating. Instead, fish that persist (attributing failure to bad timing, aggressive males, or picky females) eventually succeed as conditions shift. Self-serving bias is thus adaptive in variable environments: external attribution preserves motivation through failures, while internal attribution of success reinforces effective strategies. The bias becomes costly only when iterated failures genuinely signal dispositional mismatch, as when salmon repeatedly fail to navigate degraded streams they're no longer adapted for.