Success feels personal. Failure feels circumstantial. The gap between those two explanations isn't evidence-it's

architecture, and most of what you defend or avoid next depends on whether you recognize the pattern or let it

run your assessments invisibly. Part of The Bias Files, Simon Blackwood's insightful book explores the

self-serving bias, the psychological mechanism that drives you to credit your wins to skill and your losses to

forces beyond your control.

Why It's Never Your Fault is not a motivational guide, a collection of inspiring anecdotes, or a formula for

positive thinking. Instead, it forensically unpacks the specific, documented pattern behind your explanations,

showing you how the same event generates radically different attributions depending only on whether it flatters

you.

Through real cases drawn from business, education, sports, relationships, and public leadership, you will

confront the hidden mechanics of self-deception:

- The Shareholder Letter Test: Why the same CEO credits "strategic decisions" during profit and

"unprecedented conditions" during loss, and how shifting language reveals attribution rather than analysis.

- The Box Score Excuse: How professionals explain project failures by reaching for external

factors-market timing, unforeseen complications-that were equally present during their documented

successes.

- The Graded Exam Pattern: Why students attribute high marks to their own understanding and low

marks to unfair testing, even when the test difficulty and preparation were identical for both outcomes.

- The Divorce Narrative: How the same twenty-five-year marriage produces two incompatible origin

stories the moment it ends, each spouse casting themselves as the principled one and the other as the cause.