Narratives of Credit and Blame: Exploring Self-Serving Bias in Individual Decision-Making Through Qualitative Analysis

This study provides a qualitative, NVivo-based examination of self-serving bias as it unfolds within everyday narratives of decision-making. Moving beyond experimental attribution tasks, the findings demonstrate that self-serving bias operates as a narrative practice through which individuals construct, justify, and emotionally regulate experiences of success and failure. The analysis reveals that participants consistently claim ownership of positive outcomes through narratives emphasising agency, foresight, and competence, while distancing themselves from negative outcomes through external attribution, moral justification, and linguistic strategies that diffuse responsibility. These narrative patterns function not merely as post hoc explanations but as mechanisms of identity protection, emotional regulation, and moral self-presentation. From a theoretical perspective, the study extends attribution and self-enhancement theories by demonstrating that self-serving bias is embedded in discursive and moral storytelling processes, rather than residing solely at the level of individual cognition. By integrating narrative identity theory, the research shows how attributional bias contributes to the maintenance of a coherent and socially acceptable sense of self over time. Methodologically, the study contributes to qualitative psychology by illustrating the value of NVivo-assisted thematic and linguistic analysis in uncovering subtle attributional dynamics that are difficult to capture through quantitative measures. The systematic use of coding hierarchies, matrix queries, and text-search functions enhances analytical transparency and replicability, aligning the study with best practices in Scopus-indexed qualitative research. Practically, the findings have important implications for organisational decision-making, leadership evaluation, and ethical accountability. Recognising self-serving bias as a narrative phenomenon highlights the need for structured reflection practices, dialogic feedback, and attribution-aware performance evaluations that encourage balanced self-assessment and learning from failure. In conclusion, by positioning self-serving bias as a narrative, moral, and identity-regulating process, this study opens new pathways for research on decision-making behaviour in real-world contexts and underscores the value of qualitative methods in advancing attribution theory.

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