ArticlePLoS computational biology2025
Blaming luck, claiming skill: Self-attribution bias in error assignment.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Decisions, outcomes, and learning from what didn't go wrong.Journal of critical care medicine (Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie din Targu-Mures) · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mistakes are valuable learning opportunities, yet in uncertain environments, whether a lack of reward is due to poor performance or bad luck can be hard to tell. To investigate how humans address this issue, we developed a visuomotor task where rewards depended on either skill or chance. Participants consistently displayed a self-attribution bias, crediting successes to their own ability while blaming failures on randomness, an effect that influenced their subsequent decisions. Computational modelling revealed two underlying mechanisms-a distorted perception of ability and a positivity bias in the skill condition. Notably, while distorted self-perception shaped behaviour, it did not affect confidence; instead, self-attribution bias led to overconfidence in external blame. These findings suggest a more complex picture in which self-attribution biases arise from both perceptual distortions and post-decision evaluations, highlighting the need for an interplay between experimental design and computational modelling to understand behavioural biases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.