The Impact Of Embarrassment On Self- Serving Bias

Embarrassment is a kind of negative emotion that occurs when an individual violates social conventional rules,damaging one's personal image,and threatening one's self-concept.Embarrassment will prompt people to maintain the integrity of their self-esteem and self-concept by adopting reparative strategies.Self-serving bias is a kind of psychological strategies that can help individual to protect and promote one's self-esteem and maintain one's positive self-concept,which refers to the tendency that individuals associate themselves with positive information,and avoid associating themselves with negative information.The present study systematically examined the impact of embarrassment on self-service bias.During the current three experiments,self-serving bias was measured after inducing participants' embarrassment feelings.The embarrassment inducing paradigm has been proved to have good validity.Participants were told that their eye movement patterns,then the eye tracking patterns were showed,the focus of their attention was placed on the private parts of the characters intentionally.In the first experiment,an interpersonal events attribution task was used to measure self-serving bias,for each positive or negative interpersonal event,participants were required to evaluate the degree to which self or other caused the event.In the second experiment,the averagereferential task was used to measure self-serving bias,participants were asked to evaluate each positive or negative personality trait for themselves compared to the average student.The third experiment used the self-referential task to measure selfserving bias,participants needed to evaluate the descriptiveness of each personality trait for themselves or Bruce Lee.The results revealed that in the interpersonal events attribution task,compared with the control group,participants in embarrassment group had a stronger tendency to attribute positive events to self,while there was no significant difference for the attribution of negative events.In the average-referential task,compared to the control group,participants in embarrassment group reported that they owned less negative personality traits,no significant difference was revealed between the two groups on the rating of positive personality traits.Meanwhile,a positive correlation between the rating of positive personality traits and the level of self-esteem was found.In the selfreferential task,compared to the control group,participants in the embarrassment group evaluated the positive traits were more consistent with themselves,and the negative personality traits were less consistent with themselves.In general,the present study found that embarrassed individuals showed increased self-serving bias,to protect and promote one's self-esteem and maintain one's positive self-concept.