Modesty Bias

Modesty bias is a cognitive bias that results in a tendency for an individual to attribute success and positive events to external and situational factors while attributing failure to internal and personal factors. Modesty bias is the opposite of the self-serving bias. An example of how a person with a modesty bias thinks can be seen with a test. If the person gets a really good score on the test they would think that the teacher made it too easy or they did a good job of teaching the material. If the person fails the test they would think they failed because they are stupid. To a person with a modesty bias when good things happen it is not because of personal traits, it was because of the situation and when bad things happen it is because of personal factors.