Evidence of a self-serving bias in people's attributions for their food intake.

People often fail to acknowledge external influences on their food intake, but there might be some circumstances in which people are willing to report that those external factors influenced their behavior. This study examined whether participants who believed that they had overeaten would indicate that the portion size they were served influenced their food intake. Participants (119 women) ate a pasta lunch at two separate sessions, one week apart. At the second session, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a regular portion of pasta (the same portion as the first session) or a large portion of pasta (a portion that was twice the size), and to receive false feedback about their food intake indicating that they had either eaten about the same as or substantially more than they had at the previous session. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which the amount of food served influenced how much they ate at that second session. Compared to participants who were informed that they had eaten the same amount across the two sessions, those who were informed that they ate more at the second session reported a stronger influence of the amount of food served if they also received a large portion of pasta, but not if they received a regular portion of pasta. These findings suggest that the willingness to implicate external influences (e.g., portion size) on one's food intake may be driven by a self-serving bias, providing an "excuse" for overeating. However, the external cue must be salient enough to be a plausible explanation for one's behavior.

No self-serving bias in therapists' evaluations of clients' premature treatment termination: An approximate replication of Murdock et al. (2010).

In an often-cited study, Murdock et al. (2010) found that therapists are more likely to attribute premature treatment termination to client characteristics than to themselves, a finding that the authors interpreted in terms of a self-serving bias (SSB). We replicated and extended the study of Murdock et al. (2010, study 2). Psychologists and psychotherapists (N = 91) read two case vignettes about premature treatment terminations of clients that, in a between-subjects set-up, were either described as own clients or other therapists' clients. Next, participants used three attribution subscales (blaming therapist, client and situation) to evaluate potential causes for the premature terminations. This way, we tested whether participants would manifest SSB. We also investigated whether therapists' scores on self-confidence and need for closure were linked to SSB tendencies. Unlike Murdock et al. (2010), we found no overall SSB. However, a stronger need for closure was related to more SSB tendencies (i.e., less endorsement of 'blame therapist' attributions) in the own-client condition (r = -.35, p < .05, r2 = .12), but not in the other-therapist's-client condition (r = .17, p = .27). Our results suggest that SSB is not a ubiquitous phenomenon when therapists evaluate premature termination problems and that their willingness to attend to their own role depends to some extent on their need for closure.

Attenuated self-serving bias in people with internet gaming disorder is related to altered neural activity in subcortical-cortical midline structures.

BACKGROUND: To protect and maintain the positivity of self-concept, normal people usually show a self-serving bias (internal attribution of positive events and external attribution of negative events) by the motives of self-enhancement and self-protection. Additionally, self-serving assessments predominantly activate the subcortical-cortical midline structures (CMS) in healthy individuals. However, little is known about self-serving bias and its underlying neural correlates among individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD). METHODS: Twenty-four participants with IGD and 25 recreational Internet gaming users (RGUs) were scanned while attributing the causes of positive/negative self- and other-related events that could occur in both the game-world and real-world contexts. Region-of-interest (within CMS regions) and parametric analysis were performed to investigate the neural correlates of self-serving bias in IGD. RESULTS: Behaviorally, the IGD participants attributed more negative and fewer positive events to themselves than RGU participants in both contexts. Neurally, during the attributions of negative events, the IGD participants exhibited increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation in both contexts compared with RGU participants. Higher vmPFC activation was associated with weaker self-protective motivation in the IGD group. Meanwhile, during the attributions of positive events, the IGD participants exhibited decreased precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex activation in the real world compared with RGU participants. Parametric analysis showed a reduced positive correlation between precuneus activation and self-attribution ratings of positive events in the real world in the IGD group relative to the RGU group. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that individuals with IGD show an attenuated self-serving bias and altered brain activity within CMS regions involved in self-attribution, providing evidence for the negative self-concept and weakened abilities in both self-enhancement and self-protection in IGD.

Unattractive people are unaware of their (un)attractiveness.

Past research has shown that how people rate their physical attractiveness is only moderately correlated with how they are rated by others, suggesting that at least some people have little insight into their true level of attractiveness. The present research tests the hypothesis that unattractive people are not aware of their unattractiveness. In fact, six studies (overall N = 1,180) showed that unattractive participants considerably overestimated their attractiveness compared to ratings by strangers. In contrast, attractive participants were more accurate. If anything, they underestimated their attractiveness. It was also examined why unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness. As expected, unattractive participants differentiated less between attractive and unattractive stimulus persons than did attractive participants. They were also more likely than attractive participants to select unattractive stimulus persons to compare themselves to. However, these tendencies did not account for why unattractive participants overestimated their attractiveness, nor did affirming participant's self-worth. Limitations and avenues for future research are discussed.

How much does emotional valence of action outcomes affect temporal binding?

Temporal binding refers to the compression of the perceived time interval between voluntary actions and their sensory consequences. Research suggests that the emotional content of an action outcome can modulate the effects of temporal binding. We attempted to conceptually replicate these findings using a time interval estimation task and different emotionally-valenced action outcomes (Experiments 1 and 2) than used in previous research. Contrary to previous findings, we found no evidence that temporal binding was affected by the emotional valence of action outcomes. After validating our stimuli for equivalence of perceived emotional valence and arousal (Experiment 3), in Experiment 4 we directly replicated Yoshie and Haggard's (2013) original experiment using sound vocalizations as action outcomes and failed to detect a significant effect of emotion on temporal binding. These studies suggest that the emotional valence of action outcomes exerts little influence on temporal binding. The potential implications of these findings are discussed.

Effects of Embarrassment on Self-Serving Bias and Behavioral Response in the Context of Service Failure.

Previous research has focused on examining embarrassment in sensitive product purchase situations. Although embarrassment is a widespread emotion in consumption situations, few studies have explored its impact on service encounters, especially in the service failure context. This study examines how customers react to different service failures that cause embarrassment and explores whether self-serving bias exists when customers perceive higher embarrassment in service failure. This study uses a 2 (source of failure) × 2 (level of embarrassment) scenario experimental method to examine the effect of two sources of failure on consumer locus attributions, negative emotions, and negative behaviors, considering the moderating effects of the level of embarrassment. Data were collected from 218 student subjects in Taiwan. The results show that embarrassment is important in service failure contexts. Specifically, when consumers perceive higher embarrassment, they attribute more responsibility to the service provider. These attributions, in turn, influence customers' emotions and behavioral responses. These findings have several important theoretical and practical implications in terms of embarrassing service failures.

An Empirical Investigation of the Relationships Among Self-Esteem, Depression and Self-Serving Bias in People with Internet Gaming Disorder.

Introduction: People are generally characterized by a self-serving bias which describes the tendency to ascribe positive outcomes or success to internal or personal causes (self-enhancement motivation) and ascribe negative outcomes or failure to external or situational causes (self-protection motivation). It has been found that the individuals with internet gaming disorder (IGD) who have low self-esteem and high depression exhibit an attenuated self-serving bias. However, the relationships among self-esteem, depression and self-serving bias are not clearly identified. Methods: A sample of 138 IGD participants completed self-esteem and depression scales and a causal attribution task (Study 1) to examine the relationships among self-esteem, depression and self-serving bias (both self-enhancement and self-protection). In follow-up Study 2, 28 IGD participants were recruited to undertake self-affirmation intervention which can affirm one's sense of global self-view and bolster self-esteem to explore whether self-affirmation would trigger a reduction of depression and a raise of self-serving bias. Results: The results of path analysis in Study 1 showed that the self-serving bias was predicted by self-esteem and depression, and the depression played a mediating role between self-esteem and self-serving bias. The results of Study 2 showed that the IGD participants reported higher self-esteem, lower depression and engaged in more self-protection motivation after affirming-self manipulation as compared with affirming-other manipulation. Conclusion: These findings suggest that self-esteem predicts self-serving bias through depression and self-affirmation could trigger an increase of self-esteem, further decrease depression and improve self-serving bias for the individuals with IGD. The present article clearly identified the relationships among these factors and provided a new approach to promote positive self-concept in individuals with IGD. Future research is warranted to explore the lasting benefits of self-affirmation on domains of education, relationships and gaming withdrawal for the individuals with IGD among different populations.

The Contagion of Unethical Behavior and Social Learning: An Experimental Study.

Unethical behavior is discovered that is more contagious than ethical behavior. This article attempts to propose one of the possible underlying mechanisms-people may have underconfidence bias in information updating due to motivated reasoning, and such bias exhibits in a different direction compared to the overconfident bias documented in the literature on ethical environment, which generate the asymmetric pattern in contagion. This study designs an experiment which relates the unethical behavior to social learning, where a series of subjects with private information about penalty decide sequentially whether to conduct unethical behavior publicly. This study adopts a quantal response equilibrium to construct a structural model for estimation of the bias. In total, 162 university students participated in our experiment and the results confirm the asymmetric patterns that people rely more on others' precedent decisions rather than their private signal; therefore, the bias facilitates the contagion. This study also tests two punishment systems in the experiment and the results suggest a policy: slightly increasing penalties for the "followers" in the early stages would effectively suppress the contagion.

Self-Serving Bias in Performance Goal Achievement Appraisals: Evidence From Long-Distance Runners.

While working with a long-distance running event organizer, the authors of this study observed considerable differences between event participants' official finish time (i.e., bib time) and their self-reported finish time in the post-event survey. Drawing on the notion of self-serving bias, we aim to explore the source of this disparity and how such psychological bias influences participants' event experience at long-distance running events. Using evidence of 1,320 marathon runners, we demonstrated how people are more likely to be subject to a biased self-assessment contingent upon achieving their best finish time at the event. The study samples were split into record-high-achieved and record-high-missed groups, and the self-serving biases of each group were explored. Results from the t-test comparing record-high-achieved and -missed groups showed that runners in the record-high-missed group were significantly more likely to report a positively biased finish time than runners in the record-high-achieved group (p < 0.01). Additionally, results from logistic regression showed that as runners missed their best finish time by a wider margin, the probability of reporting a positively biased incorrect finish time increased. Lastly, we conducted an additional t-test and revealed that runners who are subject to self-serving bias showed a lower level of overall event satisfaction. The current study suggests one way to bypass the adverse effects of participant sport event participants' worse-than-expected athletic performance. We specifically suggest that the event organizers target runners who had worse-than-expected performance and make extra efforts on non-race service attributes (e.g., finish line experience, rest and recovery area, and transportation after the event) because these runners are more likely to be unsatisfied with the event.

Actor or recipient role matters: Neural correlates of self-serving bias.

INTRODUCTION: When involved in interpersonal events, people often play the role of an initiative actor (e.g., "I hit Tom") or a passive recipient (e.g., "Paul hit me"). Numerous studies have documented that people manifest a self-serving bias (SSB), that is, they tend to attribute positive interpersonal events to themselves and negative events to other external factors. Recent studies have identified the neural regions associated with the SSB; yet little is known about the neural mechanism of its modulation by the actor or recipient role. METHODS: In this study, participants were scanned while they attributed the positive or negative events in which the self played the actor or recipient role. RESULTS: The results showed that people manifested more SSB than non-SSB (NONSSB) attributions and spent less time on making the former. Importantly, more SSB attributions and shorter reaction times were found in the actor than in the recipient condition. Greater activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) was observed in responding to NONSSB than SSB attributions only in the actor condition. Furthermore, the greater the difference in dmPFC activity in responding to NONSSB and SSB attributions, the smaller the difference in corresponding attribution response. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that people prefer making heuristic SSB attributions, and more cognitive resources are needed when they make NONSSB attributions. The activity of the dmPFC may be associated with inhibiting the heuristic SSB, especially when they play the actor role at interpersonal events.

How Do Video Games Elicit Guilt in Players? Linking Character Morality to Guilt Through a Mediation Analysis.

Research has consistently found that committing immoral actions in video games is capable of eliciting feelings of guilt in players. This study aimed to investigate the mediating role of theoretically-relevant psychological mechanisms: Perceived morality of the player-controlled character and self-attribution of virtual behavior. Based in psychological and communication theory, we derived a model that links these variables to character portrayal and guilt. A between-subjects experiment manipulated the portrayal of the player-controlled character (immoral vs. moral) and measured the mediating variables and self-reported guilt. The hypothesized model was tested using a path model. Data were generally consistent with hypotheses. Controlling an immoral character reduced perceived character morality. Perceived character morality positively predicted self-attribution of character behavior and negatively predicted guilt. Self-attribution positively predicted guilt but self-attribution and perceived character morality did not interact. Our findings suggest novel directions for continued research into how game features elicit emotional responses in players.

"Scapegoat" for Offline Consumption: Online Review Response to Social Exclusion.

Previous research has mostly focused on Internet use behaviors, such as usage time of the Internet or social media after individuals experienced offline social exclusion. However, the extant literature has ignored online response behaviors, such as online review responses to social exclusion. To address this gap, drawing on self-protection and self-serving bias, we proposed three hypotheses that examine the effect of offline social exclusion on online reviews, which are verified by two studies using different simulating scenarios with 464 participants. The results show that when individuals are socially excluded offline, regardless of where the exclusion comes from (businesses or peers), they will be more likely to give negative online reviews. In addition, brand awareness moderates the effect of offline social exclusion on online reviews. Specifically, if the brand is less known, compared with social inclusion, offline social exclusion will lead individuals to give more negative online reviews; conversely, for well-known brands, no significant difference exists in the online reviews between social exclusion and inclusion.

Stage 1 Registered Report: How responsibility attributions to self and others relate to outcome ownership in group decisions.

Responsibility judgements have important consequences in human society. Previous research focused on how someone's responsibility determines the outcome they deserve, for example, whether they are rewarded or punished. Here, we investigate the opposite link: How outcome ownership influences responsibility attributions in a social context. Participants in a group of three perform a majority vote decision-making task between gambles that can lead to a reward or no reward. Only one group member receives the outcome and participants evaluate their and the other players' responsibility for the obtained outcome. Two hypotheses are tested: 1) Whether outcome ownership increases responsibility attributions even when the control over an outcome is similar. 2) Whether people's tendency to attribute higher responsibility for positive vs negative outcomes will be stronger for players who received the outcome. The findings of this study may help reveal how credit attributions can be biased toward particular individuals who receive outcomes as a result of collective work.

A comprehensive meta-analysis of the self-serving bias in schizophrenia spectrum disorders compared to non-clinical subjects.

We conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis to investigate the self-serving bias SSB in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) to examine its specificity for persecutory delusions, paranoia, and to explore sources of heterogeneity in previous findings. We included 56 studies with n = 2501 patients with SSD and n = 2601 non-clinical controls in the main random-effects model using Hedges' g. Data quality and risk of bias were assessed. Results showed that SSB was a function of the method of measurement, and the cultural background of the participants, thereby identifying important sources of heterogeneity in measuring SSB in patients with SSD. The SSD group was somewhat more prone to SSB (g = 0.17), especially, when in a state of active persecutory delusion (g = 0.32/0.57), when they scored high in paranoid ideation (r = 0.25), or tended to jump to conclusions (r = 0.43). High self-esteem in the SSD group was associated with high SSB (r = 0.34); depression with low SSB (r=-0.39).

Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Self-Serving Attribution Biases in the Competitive Context of Organized Sport.

This meta-analysis explored the magnitude of self-serving attribution biases for real-world athletic outcomes. A comprehensive literature search identified 69 studies (160 effect sizes; 10,515 athletes) that were eligible for inclusion. Inverse-variance weighted random-effects meta-analysis showed that sport performers have a tendency to attribute personal success to internal factors and personal failure to external factors (k = 40, standardized mean difference [SMD] = 0.62), a tendency to attribute team success to factors within the team and team failure to factors outside the team (k = 23, SMD = 0.63), and a tendency to claim more personal responsibility for team success and less personal responsibility for team failure (k = 4, SMD = 0.28). There was some publication bias and heterogeneity in computed averages. Random effects meta-regression identified sample sex, performance level, and world-region as important moderators of pooled mean effects. These findings provide a foundation for theoretical development of self-serving tendencies in real-world settings.

Static and dynamic functional connectivity of the prefrontal cortex during resting-state predicts self-serving bias in depression.

Major depression disorder (MDD) is characterized by the lack of self-serving bias, which may inherently underlie the onset and maintenance of depression. Emerging neuroimaging evidences have indicated that the altered self-processing in MDD may be germane to the dysfunctional static resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although static RSFC studies provide tremendous amounts of evidences on functional changes in depression, explorations of dynamic RSFC among the PFC and other brain regions may elucidate the temporal changes of neural activities associated with depression. To further explore the behavioral and neural correlates of self-serving bias, 21 depressed and 23 non-depressed individuals underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan and completed a self-serving bias task. Static and dynamic RSFC analyses were conducted for specific subregions of the PFC, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the ventral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex. Depressed patients showed an attenuated self-serving bias as compared with controls, and aberrant static and dynamic RSFC among these subregions of the PFC. In particular, the self-serving bias was associated with static dmPFC-to-OFC RSFC and dynamic vlPFC-to-OFC RSFC for MDD group. The aberrant RSFC of the PFC may serve as a predictor for self-serving bias in depression.

Changes of Causal Attribution by a Co-actor in Situations of Obvious Causality.

In social contexts, people are responsible for their actions and outcomes. Diffusion of responsibility is a well-known social phenomenon: people feel less responsible when performing an action with co-actors than when acting alone. In previous studies, co-actors reduced the participant's responsibility attribution by making the cause of the outcomes ambiguous. Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the presence of co-actors creates diffusion of responsibility even in situations where it is "obvious" that both oneself and the co-actor are the causes of an outcome. To investigate this potential diffusion of responsibility, we used a temporal binding (TB) task as a measure of causal attribution. Low TB effects indicate the enhancement of external attribution (i.e., diffusion of responsibility) in perceptual processing for the action and outcomes. To investigate the influence of presence of a co-actor on causal attribution, participants were required to act under two experimental conditions: an ALONE condition (participant only) or a TOGETHER condition (with a co-actor). The only difference between the two conditions was whether the actions were shared. In addition, to make participants feel responsible, they were induced to feel guilt. In the High-harm condition, participants gave a financial reduction to a third party. When guilt was induced, participants showed lower TB effects in the TOGETHER condition compared to the ALONE condition. Our study suggests that actions with a co-actor change causal attributions even though the causes of the outcome are obvious. This may have implications for understanding diffusion of responsibility in inhumane situations.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Has No Specific Effect on Self-referential Processes.

The processing of self-referential information can be influenced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The present randomized controlled study investigated whether similar effects can be elicited through the application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) regarding the "self-serving bias" (SSB) and the "mnemic neglect effect" (MNE). Seventy-five healthy males (M age = 25; SD = 4.3) were investigated in a between-groups design with random assignment by applying anodal, cathodal, or sham tDCS to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). After stimulation, the participants judged if 80 personality traits (40 positive, 40 negative) were self-descriptive or not. Finally, the participants had to recall the previously presented adjectives. All three stimulation groups showed the expected SSB and MNE. Still, and contrary to our hypotheses, tDCS revealed neither a significant interaction effect between groups and valence concerning the number of chosen self-referential traits (F (2,72) = 1.36, p = 0.26, η G 2 = 0.02) nor an interaction effect between groups, valence, and self-reference concerning the percentage of recalled words (F (2,71) = 0.69, p = 0.50, η G 2 = 0.01). However, a post hoc inspection of effect sizes revealed that less negative traits were indicated as self-referential in the anodal compared to the cathodal group (ES: -0.59; CI: -1.16 to -0.03). Moreover, the participants showed-regardless of self-reference and type of stimulation-a better recall with tDCS in comparison to sham stimulation. Our results indicate that tDCS of the mPFC in healthy young men has no influence on the SSB and the MNE. However, tDCS seems to improve memory performance.

Are Cheaters Sexual Hypocrites? Sexual Hypocrisy, the Self-Serving Bias, and Personality Style.

This article examines moral hypocrisy and the self-serving bias (SSB) in the sexual infidelity context. We found evidence of self-serving attributions that occur between primary relationship partners following sexual betrayals. Specifically, we found that sexual infidelity perpetrators (a) blamed their primary dyadic partners (i.e., victims) for infidelities significantly more than those victims blamed themselves for such infidelities, (b) blamed the surrounding circumstances for infidelities significantly more than their victims did, and (c) rated the emotional impact of infidelities on their victims as significantly less than victims' ratings of such impact. Moreover, we found that participants with prior experience as both sexual infidelity perpetrators and victims displayed "sexual hypocrisy" by judging others more harshly than themselves for sexually unfaithful behavior. Our findings demonstrate that personality variables associated with sexual infidelity (narcissism, sexual narcissism, avoidant attachment, and primary psychopathy) are also relevant to self-serving attributions in the sexual infidelity context.

Sense of agency in continuous action is influenced by outcome feedback in one-back trials.

Sense of agency (SoA) is a subjective feeling that a person controls his/her own actions and causes changes in the external world. In continuous action such as controlling a dot by keypresses, SoA is influenced by actual actions during the task. Additionally, it is known that even though the actual actions were almost identical, outcome feedback (e.g., success or fail) could modulate SoA, indicating a retrospective modulation of SoA. However, it was unclear whether the SoA modulated by outcome feedback would influence SoA for an up-coming action. Here, we investigated the effects of outcome feedback in one-back trial on SoA in the present trial (i.e., prospective modulation). We conducted three experiments where participants controlled a dot to a target whose color changed unpredictably between white and blue. If the dot reached the target when the color was white (blue), participants received a text feedback of "Success" ("Fail"). However, in fact, we predetermined the outcome feedback to remove the effects of the actual performance of participants on SoA. The results showed that if the outcome feedback of the one-back trial was successful, SoA of the present trial became higher (i.e., prospective modulation) until they received the outcome feedback. Moreover, the prospectively modulated SoA was retrospectively overwritten by the outcome feedback of the present trial and likely converged to a constant level. These findings indicated that SoA was not produced by a mere sum of the prospective and retrospective factors, but rather that these factors independently influenced SoA with differential time courses.