Self-Serving Bias and how it effects your League experience

I see a lot of people complaining about things like: My team always X, while I'm always X. While I'm guessing that happened a few times, each and every one of you has been the biggest factor in your loss at least in one of the past 20 games you've played.

So why do you feel like you always have the bad team mates? Or why you only win when you hard carry? There is actually a psychological reason behind it.

Self-Serving Bias

Essentially, it means this: You have a tendency to attribute mistakes from others on character (dispositional factors) and your mistakes on the environment (situational factors)

In game, when you make a mistake, you will attribute it to something like: "the jungler is camping me" "I got unlucky and missed that skillshot" or "I forgot he had ignite to all-in me" "I thought my support would follow up, that was so obvious"

However, if your team mate makes a mistake

"This guy is so stupid he isn't warding for the jungler" "This guy can't land skillshots, if he could we could kill them" "Can't this guy press tab and see his opponent has ignite, so stupid" "My ADC has no brain and is taking a bad all-in, I can't follow up or we both die"

Do you see the difference in the two statements?

Every time you make a mistake you blame it on something out of your control or something that you did because of the situation around you. Even if they ended up with bad consequences, it's not because you're a bad player, its because you got unlucky or the situation forced your hand.

Every time your team mate made a mistake you blame it on them being bad. If he keeps getting ganked, he should learn to play more passive - you don't feel empathy for the fact that if you were in the same situation you (in the same ELO) would probably die just as much to a camp. Or he has no map awareness because he didn't see the mid roam, even though in the previous game you died to mid roam 3 times.

Due to this bias, you will consistently think that Riot is putting you with bad team mates, even though they're probably at your same skill level and are having a bad game - but if you help them through their bad game they can probably turn around and carry you because suprise, they're still the same skill level. However, if you feed in a game, its because you have a bad matchup, denied levels, dove under tower, etc etc - not your fault, just a bad game.

Maybe you have a good KDA every game, but all your team mates think that you're a bad player because you play too passive and pretty much play for KDA instead of trying to push your limits.

Example: Maybe if you suicided as Naut into their team when your jinx is 10/0, sure you'd lose KDA, but you'd win the game. You have a different perspective. Maybe you don't think that the Jinx can carry, maybe the Jinx is frustrated that no one will front line for her so she can win you the game. You get pissed when Jinx gets killed for being too far up, while Jinx thinks your bad for not engaging the 4v5, and thinks she has to do it herself. You are BOTH bad team mates in each other's eyes.

TL;DR: People will always complain about their team mates because its human nature to disregard our own flaws and attribute our successes to character while attributing our failures to the environmental factors. You, yes you, have been the subject of someone else's "bad team mate" and you don't even know it.

You will always have this bias, but you can mitigate its effects on your mentality by knowing its there and trying to get a more holistic view.