The Self-Serving Bias: Taking Credit, Avoiding Blame

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1. 12 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   3 corrections applied: Author's first name is Miron, not Mervin (matches later text and reference list) | Cross (1977) concerned teachers' self-ratings (94% above-average teachers); the 93% above-average drivers stat is from Svenson (1981), not Cross | Barber & Odean's 66,465-household study (1991-1996) was published in 2000, not 1998

   Before

   The 3 named corrections (Miron Zuckerman, Cross 94 percent teachers/Svenson driving stats, Barber & Odean 2000) were applied to the main sentences. But: (1) a leftover sentence still read "The gap between 93 percent and 50 percent is not a rounding error" using the old unverified figure; (2) the Barber & Odean (2000) Journal of Finance paper had no bibliography entry; (3) the FAQ field had a question titled "What did the Cross 1977 driving study find?" whose answer conflated Cross (teachers) with Svenson (driving) and used stale 93%/69% figures, plus a separate FAQ answer citing an unverified "Odean's 1999 Journal of Finance analysis of 10,000 brokerage accounts" with a 3.4 percentage point stat not in the article.

   After

   (1) Changed the leftover sentence to "The gap between 94 percent and 50 percent is not a rounding error." (2) Added bibliography entry: Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2000). Trading is hazardous to your wealth. Journal of Finance, 55(2), 773-806. (3) Rewrote the FAQ Q&A pair to correctly separate Cross's 1977 teacher finding (94% self-rated above average) from Svenson's 1981 driving finding (88% American / 77% Swedish), and rewrote the investor FAQ answer to cite Barber and Odean's 2000 study of 66,465 accounts (1991-1996) instead of the unverified Odean 1999/10,000-account claim.

   Why: The three named corrections were correctly applied to their primary sentences, but a same-fact leftover mention of the stale 93% figure remained further down in the body text, the Barber & Odean citation was entirely missing from the bibliography despite being discussed twice in-text, and the FAQ field contained two separate fabrication clusters restating the same errors (Cross/Svenson conflation with wrong percentages, and an unverified Odean 1999 investor study).

   All were corrected and the FAQ field was re-verified to still decode to a valid 5-item array after the fix.

   View the full record →

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