Social psychology

The fourteenth entry is le biais d’autocomplaisance, and the noun buried in it looks like an English word it is not. La complaisance is not complacency. It is the readiness to oblige, to go along with what somebody else wants, and it usually goes a step too far: un certificat de complaisance is a certificate written as a favour rather than on the facts, une interview de complaisance asks nothing awkward, and sourire par complaisance is to smile only to be agreeable. « Complacency » in English is a different fault altogether, the calm self-satisfaction that stops a person seeing danger, and French calls that l’autosatisfaction or la suffisance. So l’autocomplaisance is the indulgence one shows oneself, the friendly certificate issued to one’s own file: a success is put down to talent, a failure to bad luck or to other people. The settled English term is « self-serving bias ». « Self-complacency bias » would describe somebody too pleased with himself to look, which is a separate mistake, and a reader who knows the false friend will not write it.