• DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.38.1.23
• Corpus ID: 8215976

Social anxiety, self-presentation, and the self-serving bias in causal attribution.

@article{Arkin1980SocialAS,
  title={Social anxiety, self-presentation, and the self-serving bias in causal attribution.},
  author={Robert M. Arkin and Alan J. Appelman and Jerry M. Burger},
  journal={Journal of personality and social psychology},
  year={1980},
  volume={38 1},
  pages={
          23-35
        }
}

• R. Arkin, A. Appelman, J. Burger
• Published 1980
• Psychology
• Journal of personality and social psychology

Two experiments were conducted to provide evidence concerning the contribution of self-presentation concerns to the self-serving bias in causal attribution (individuals' tendency to assume more personal responsibility for a success than for a failure outcome) and its occasional, but systematic, reversal. In Experiment 1 high- but not low-social-anxiety participants presented themselves in a far more modest light when a committee of high prestige others was to join the experimenter in evaluating their behavior than when the committee evaluation was canceled. In Experiment 2 this reversal of the self-serving bias among high-social-anxiety subjects (in the evaluative context) was replicated, and it was also found that both high- and low-social-anxiety participants portrayed the causes of their behavior in a more modest fashion when they responded via the "bogus pipeline," a measurement technique designed to reduce distortion and dissimulation in verbal responses, than when they responded in the traditional paper-and-pencil format (although the influence of the bogus pipeline above and beyond the committee evaluation in eliciting "honest" responses from subjects only reached significance for low-social-anxiety subjects). These findings are discussed in terms of the varying self-presentation strategies and differing self-concepts of individuals high and low in social anxiety, as well as the self-presentation component to apparently self-enhancing and self-effacing causal attributions for performance.