The Mechanism Of Self-Serving Bias

It is very common that people often attribute desirable outcomes to their ability or efforts, and attribute undesirable outcomes to others or situation. The tendency that people take personal credit when they succeed and deny their responsibility for failure is called self-serving bias. This bias is widespread in the daily life, especially when people face the negative outcomes. Some researches show that self-serving bias is affected by age, gender, culture, emotion, and psychopathology.The researches regarding mechanism of self-serving bias mainly focus on whether the self-serving bias reflects a motivated process or merely reflects the way people process information and make judgments. The motivational approach argues that people make attributions in a way they can maintain their self-esteem and feel good about themselves. As a result, they distort their perception of the cause of the outcome by making internal attributions for success and external attributions for failure. In contrast, the cognitive approach argues that people make attributions based on whether or not the outcome is consistent with their expectations. In fact, it is found that people make external attributions for unexpected outcomes, whether it is positive or negative. Some other researchers proposed a more general perspective by integrating both the motivational and cognitive approaches into one paradigm. In current, social psychological researches of the self-serving bias are extensive, but there is relatively little research on its neural underpinnings. Therefore, the current study is to investigate the characteristic and neural mechanism of the self-serving bias using behavioral and fMRI methods, giving participants false feedback (correct or incorrect, random present, each50%) after a facial working memory task. Then participants made internal or external attributions according to the feedback.Experiment1:The behavioral study of self-serving bias. Thirty participants participated in the experiment (15men,15women). The finding suggests that the interaction between feedback and attribution is significant, F(1,29)=8.63, p<0.01. There are significant differences between the number of self-serving bias and non-self-serving bias,t(28)=4.14,p<0.001. Compared to the internal attributions, participants make more external attributions when provided with failure feedback, F(1,29)=50.82,p<0.001, but did not make more external attributions when provided with success feedback, F(1,29)=1.50, p=0.23. In addition, there is no significant difference in response times between self-serving and non-self-serving bias,t(28)=0.06,p=0.956.Experiment2:The fMRI study of self-serving bias. Twenty-two participants participated in the experiment (12men,10women). The behavioral results are consistent with that of the experiment1. The fMRI results suggest that the self-serving bias is associated with activation in the left putamen, left caudate nucleus, left thalamus, left claustrum, left medial frontal cortex, left superior frontal cortex, left cingulated, left precuneus, left middle temporal cortex, and right posterior lobe.In conclusion, it is suggested that (1) there is significant interaction between feedback and attribution. People make more self-serving bias than non-self-serving bias. But there is no significant difference between the positive feedback of internal attributions and external attributions, only in the negative feedback participants make more external attributions, comparing with internal attributions.(2) According to the functions of activated brain areas, the caudate is associated with motivational control, cognitive and motivational systems interact within the caudate and putamen, and the activation in medial frontal cortex (include cingulated and medial prefrontal cortex) and superior frontal cortex reflect the overlap of self-reflective and social-cognitive processing. Therefore, both motivational and cognitive control may give rise to self-serving bias, it is not enough to explain the mechanism of self-serving bias only from cognitive or motivational point of view.