Band and Bias

Band, like any team activity, elicits a lot of motivational biases. Motivational biases skew our perception because they show us what we want and need to see instead of an objective view. As a member of a marching band, it is really easy to blame a bad performance on the stadium, the crowd, the drums, the drum major, the weather, judges, etc. When other bands are announced as better than our band, it's because they went later in the day and didn't have the sun in their eyes, because their director is good friends with a judge, or because they have a tract record of being good. Of course a good performance is not attributed to any of these things but are a fair result of hard work and skill. When we are announced as better than other bands, it's because we worked harder, our marching show takes more skill, or we play our instruments better. This bias to attribute successes to ourselves and failures to outside influences is called the self-serving bias and is prominent in most people outside of Eastern cultures (Mezulis et al., 2005).
As a member of band, a tight-knit group of students with the same goals, it is also easy to fall prey to the false-consensus effect. This is our tendency to think that others agree with us to a greater degree than they actually do (Krueger, 1998; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). For example, when we start saying all of these bad things about other bands, our companions back us up which results not only fulfilling their own self=serving bias, but giving us a sense that everyone agrees with us. Of course our teammates are going to back us up though. This causes us to think that everyone agrees with us. Really, we are only one band out of 20 or so, and all of the other bands think the same things about us as we do about them.
While in band I also was a believer in a just world. Belief in a just world means that bad things happen only to bad people, and whatever misfortunes befall a person are deserved (Lerner, 1980). This is a defense bias because otherwise bad things would happen to good people, and we would be at risk the same as everyone else. While at a very important competition, I heard that a band, who usually placed higher than us, came from the same area as us, and took the same roads, had a bus wreck on the way to competition. As a result of the wreck and inevitable delay, the band was unable to compete that day. To justify not only the bus wreck that didn't happen to our band but finally taking the first place trophy, we said that we were always better performers, and they only place higher than us because they are so much bigger and more impressive though we are more talented. They deserved to be disqualified because they had taken our first place trophy from us many times before. This was wrong. Even if our claims were true, a bus full of band members did not deserve to be in a wreck and the whole band be disqualified. However, this is how we justified that it would not happen to us.

Krueger, J. (1998). On the perception of social consensus. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 163-240.

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 711-747.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.