The Self-Serving Bias In Implicit Causality

The self-serving bias refers to the tendency that individuals are more likely to take responsibility for positive events but dismiss negative events as attributable to other causes. Maintaining this positive beliefs about oneself is one fundamental need of human beings. For years, the self-serving bias has been investigated through explicit responsibility attribution. For example, participants were often asked to work on a task, after which they were given success or failure outcome feedback randomly. The accumulated evidence supported that people tended to attribute success to themselves but failure to other persons, manifesting the self-serving bias in explicit responsibility attribution. In most studies of this kind, tasks measuring purportedly novel abilities or characteristics were adopted to make it difficult to evaluate one’s real ability. And the outcome feedback was randomly assigned to the individuals. As a result, people had few external clues or criteria to make responsibility attribution.While at many moments in social life, the inherent logic of the interpersonal events could give people clues and criteria to attribute these events to some causes. Taking two descriptions with implicit causality verbs "YangLi hits WangShan" and "YangLi praises WangShan" as an example, most people tended to attribute the former event to "YangLi" (i.e., the actor of the event, and the subject of the sentence) and the latter to "WangShan" (i.e., the recipient of the event, and the object of the sentence). This is due to the fact that the implicit causality verbs carry important implications with regard to which person is perceived as causally responsible for the described event. These verbs are often used to create the third-person interpersonal events to investigate the process of sentence comprehension in the existing research. In the present study, we introduced the implicit causality events and substituted "self for the actor or recipient of the interpersonal events (e.g., "I hit YangLi" or "WangShan hits me"). Thus, the self-serving bias could be examined in implicit causality where the inherent logic of the interpersonal events could give us clues and criteria to make attribution. So far, it was still an open question whether the self-serving bias could manifest in implicit causality.The present study is aimed at exploring the self-serving bias in implicit causality and its neural mechanism. Moreover, given that the self-serving bias is sensitive to situational factors, we also manipulated two situational factors (the level of self-awareness and power) which might be associated with the activation of self-enhancement or self-protection motivation to explore their effects on the self-serving bias in implicit causality.The dissertation is comprised of three studies. In study 1, we created the self-relevant and other-relevant positive and negative interpersonal events to explore the self-serving bias in implicit causality (experiment 1B) through comparing with the self-serving bias in explicit responsibility attribution (experiment 1A). The actor or recipient role that self played in the self-relevant interpersonal events was also manipulated in the present study. Results showed that people manifested greater self-serving bias when the attributional target took the role of an actor relative to recipient in implicit causality. In study 2, we explored the impact factors of the self-serving bias in implicit causality through comparing with the self-serving bias in explicit responsibility attribution. In experiment 2A and 2B, we manipulated the self-awareness level through using or not using a camera during the experiment. In experiment 3A and 3B, the power level was manipulated by role assignment (the leader or the subordinate) during the task. Results showed that the level of self-awareness and power had different impact on the self-serving bias in two attribution contexts. Specifically, people’s attributional patterns were influenced by the level of the self-awareness and power in explicit responsibility attribution. However, in implicit causality, the self-serving bias was barely subject to the influence of these situational factors. In study 3, we explored the neural mechanism underlying how actor-recipient role would affect the self-serving bias in implicit causality using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI). The activation of the dmPFC was greater for the accurate self-evaluation relative to the self-serving evaluation, indicating that activations in dmPFC might be related to the suppression of the self-serving bias. Importantly, when we compared the attributional process for self with that for other person, results showed that greater self-related (self-other) dmPFC activations were associated with longer reaction time for self relative to other for the recipient in negative events.In general, this study combined the behavioral and functional imaging methods to explore the self-serving bias in implicit causality. It provided evidences for the existence of the self-serving bias in implicit causality. This bias was barely subject to the influence of situational factors influence, but rather was mainly dependent upon the factors associated with the events per se, such as the actor or recipient role that self played in emotional situations. Activities in dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) might be associated with the suppression of the self-serving bias in implicit causality.