A conceptual scheme for assessing evenhandedness and (counter) self-serving attributional biases in relation to depression

Various hypotheses have been proposed concerning the attributional styles of depressive and nondepressive persons. Some hypotheses are compatible with others; some are mutually exclusive. In this paper we present a scheme for organizing these hypotheses. A method is offered for deciding which hypothesis best fits data from samples which are heterogeneous with regard to extent of depression. The concepts reviewed include "self-serving bias," "counter-self-serving bias," "evenhandedness," "depressive lower self-enhancement," "counter-defensive attribution," the "Abramson, et al. hypothesis" that depressed persons attribute events with bad outcomes more to internal, stable, and global causes than do nondepressed persons, and the "Seligman, et al. hypothesis" that depressed persons attribute events of good outcome less to these causes than do nondepressed persons.     

Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias.

Researchers have suggested the presence of a self-serving attributional bias, with people making more internal, stable, and global attributions for positive events than for negative events. This study examined the magnitude, ubiquity, and adaptiveness of this bias. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 266 studies, yielding 503 independent effect sizes. The average d was 0.96, indicating a large bias. The bias was present in nearly all samples. There were significant age differences, with children and older adults displaying the largest biases. Asian samples displayed significantly smaller biases (d = 0.30) than U.S. (d = 1.05) or Western (d = 0.70) samples. Psychopathology was associated with a significantly attenuated bias (d = 0.48) compared with samples without psychopathology (d = 1.28) and community samples (d = 1.08). The bias was smallest for samples with depression (0.21), anxiety (0.46), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (0.55). Findings confirm that the self-serving attributional bias is pervasive in the general population but demonstrates significant variability across age, culture, and psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causal attributions in paranoia and depression: Internal, personal, and situational attributions for negative events.

Causal attributions for positive and negative hypothetical social events made by paranoid patients, depressed patients, and nonpatient participants were examined via a novel measure of causal locus, the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire. Depressed patients tended to attribute negative social events to internal (self-blaming) causes. Nonpatient participants and patients with delusions of persecution tended to avoid such self-blame. However, whereas nonpatient participants tended to choose situational or circumstantial external attributions, paranoid patients tended to choose external attributions that located blame in other individuals. These findings support R. P. Bentall, P. Kinderman, and S. Kaney's (1994) defensive attributional model of persecutory delusions, suggest some modifications to that model, and have implications for the understanding of the relationship between causal attributions and social and self-perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-serving attributional biases: Perceptual or response distortions?

Examines D. T. Miller's (see record 1980-09658-001) analysis of what constitutes a self-serving attributional bias. It is argued that his delineation of different types of self-serving attributions is not supported by the empirical evidence collected to date and that what previous authors (e.g., D. T. Miller and M. Ross, 1975) have viewed as a perceptual bias in the causal inference process may be better seen as a response bias or as a strategic self-presentation designed to maximize public esteem. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognition and the manic defense: Attributions, selective attention, and self-schema in bipolar affective disorder.

Manic patients, depressed bipolar patients, and normal controls were compared on measures of social cognition. Manic patients showed a normal self-serving bias on the Attributional Style Questionnaire, but depressed patients attributed negative events more than positive events to self. On an implicit test of attributional style, both patient groups attributed negative events more than positive events to self. Both patient groups showed slowed color naming for depression-related but not euphoria-related words. Manic patients, like normal controls, endorsed mainly positive words as true of self but, like the depressed patients, recalled mainly negative words. Findings from the implicit tests indicate a common form of psychological organization in manic and depressed patients, whereas the contrasts between the scores on the implicit and explicit measures are consistent with the hypothesis of a manic defense. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sentence verification and delusions: a content-specific deficit

BACKGROUND: A sentence verification task was developed to investigate semantic memory in schizophrenia. METHODS: The test consisted of three types of sentence (true, unlikely and nonsense) and seven different types of content (neutral, persecutory, grandiose, political, religious, relationships and somatic) representing common delusional themes present in schizophrenic patients. Sixty-three schizophrenic patients and 66 matched control subjects were asked to make true/false judgements to 143 sentences. RESULTS: Overall accuracy was similar across the two groups; sentences with some emotional themes and sentences of the unlikely type produced the most violations. Significant differences between the two subject groups were found specifically on nonsense sentences with persecutory and religious themes. Patients made significantly more incorrect responses (acceptance) to nonsense sentences that had an emotional content congruent with their delusional beliefs, past or present, and also on unlikely sentences (incorrect rejections) whose content was not congruent with their delusions. Further analysis of response bias in the patients showed, overall, that there were more incorrect rejections (a reflection of the large number of unlikely sentence errors) and more incorrect responses to sentences congruent with patients delusions. Furthermore, analysis of those patients currently experiencing delusions revealed more incorrect responses to sentences congruent with their delusional ideas compared with patients not currently deluded. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are indicative of cognitive bias in schizophrenia towards certain emotional themes that may underlie illogical semantic connections and delusions.     

Attributional bias and course evaluations.

Self-serving bias, a type of attributional bias, refers to people's tendency to take credit for success and avoid blame for failure. How this affects course evaluations is tested by comparing the self-esteem model, predicting that evaluations reflect actual grades, with the expectancy-confirmation model, predicting that evaluations reflect confirmation or disconfirmation of grade expectations. Questionnaire data were obtained from all students (N?=?691) in 38 classes representing 16 disciplines. Analyses at both the individual and class-mean level show that "self-serving" bias has a minimal or nonexistent effect on evaluations; that the self-esteem model explains best; and that the amount of bias caused by grades, self-serving bias, and 18 demographic/situational variables is low for all evaluation dimensions. The results support the validity of properly obtained course evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing the continuum of delusional beliefs: An experimental study using virtual reality.

A key problem in studying a hypothesized spectrum of severity of delusional ideation is determining that ideas are unfounded. The first objective was to use virtual reality to validate groups of individuals with low, moderate, and high levels of unfounded persecutory ideation. The second objective was to investigate, drawing upon a cognitive model of persecutory delusions, whether clinical and nonclinical paranoia are associated with similar causal factors. Three groups (low paranoia, high nonclinical paranoia, persecutory delusions) of 30 participants were recruited. Levels of paranoia were tested using virtual reality. The groups were compared on assessments of anxiety, worry, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anomalous perceptual experiences, reasoning, and history of traumatic events. Virtual reality was found to cause no side effects. Persecutory ideation in virtual reality significantly differed across the groups. For the clear majority of the theoretical factors there were dose–response relationships with levels of paranoia. This is consistent with the idea of a spectrum of paranoia in the general population. Persecutory ideation is clearly present outside of clinical groups and there is consistency across the paranoia spectrum in associations with important theoretical variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style and the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern.

Examined the attributional styles of Types A (coronary-prone) and B (non-coronary-prone) individuals in 2 studies in which 62 undergraduates and 199 18–65 yr old county residents, classified on the Jenkins Activity Survey, completed an attributional style questionnaire. Past research suggests that Type A's exhibit greater performance deficits than Type B's following exposure to extended, salient uncontrollable stimuli. The reformulated learned-helplessness model suggests that individuals most prone to such performance deficits should exhibit an attributional style characterized by internal, stable, and global attributions for negative outcomes, but external, unstable, and specific attributions for positive outcomes. However, a self-esteem protection explanation of learned-helplessness findings predicts an opposite, self-serving attributional style. Results from both studies indicate that Type A's were more self-serving than Type B's in their attributions for positive and negative outcomes. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style in depression: A meta-analytic review.

Conducted a meta-analysis of the attribution–depression relation in studies appearing in the clinical, social, personality, and educational literatures. In 104 studies involving nearly 15,000 Ss, several attributional patterns had reliable associations with depression scores. For negative events, attributions to internal, stable, and global causes had a reliable and significant association with depression. Studies in which the attribution factors of ability and luck were measured also showed a reliable association with depression. Ability and luck attribution factors for positive events were also associated with depression. The relations for positive events, however, were weaker than the corresponding ones for negative events. In general, these patterns of relations were independent of a number of potential mediators suggested by authors in this literature, including the type of S studied (psychiatric vs college student), the type of event about which the attribution is made (real vs simulated), the depression measure used, or the publication status of the research report. Conclusions are compared with those of other reviews. Implications for attributional models of depression are discussed. (81 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-awareness, probability of improvement, and the self-serving bias.

Evidence for the self-serving bias (attributing success internally and failure externally) is inconsistent. Although internal success attributions are consistently found, researchers find both internal and external attributions for failure. The authors explain these disparate effects by considering the intersection of 2 systems, a system comparing self against standards and a causal attribution system. It was predicted that success and failure attributions are moderated by self-awareness and by the ability to improve. When self-focus is high (a) success is attributed internally, (b) failure is attributed internally when people can improve, (c) failure is attributed externally when people cannot improve, and (d) these attributions affect state self-esteem. Implications for the self-serving bias are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceiving the causes of unemployment: An evaluation of the Causal Dimensions Scale in a real-life situation.

The perceived causes for employment (success) and unemployment (failure) were considered in a longitudinal study with 378 higher professional graduates, who completed a questionnaire shortly before (imaginary situation) and 6 months after their final exam (real-life situation). The design permitted a comparison for the same subjects of causal attributions for an initially imaginary occurrence that eventually became real. Although the results indicate some inadequacies in the internal structure of the Causal Dimensions Scale (CDS), the subscale structure was found to be invariant across conditions (success/failure) and situations (imaginary/real-life). Furthermore, the CDS showed a considerable divergent validity. The perceived causes for (un)employment were consistent with the literature suggesting a self-serving attributional bias. Contrary to expectation the subjects did not change their causal perceptions when becoming actually (un)employed. Indications were found for a self-serving motivational bias, resulting in labor-market success for those who are initially optimistic and motivated to find a job. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive factors in source monitoring and auditory hallucinations

BACKGROUND: In order to elucidate further the cognitive processes underlying auditory hallucinations, an experiment investigating delayed and immediate source monitoring for positive, negative and neutral verbal material was conducted with schizophrenic patients. METHODS: Patients experiencing auditory hallucinations, patients not experiencing auditory hallucinations and normal subjects participated in a word association task, rating their responses for how much a self-generated thought was their own, how controllable and involuntary it was and their confidence in these ratings. A delayed source monitoring test in which subjects had to recall the source (self or experimenter) of the words from the association task was also administered. RESULTS: Hallucinators showed a greater bias towards external attribution of their thoughts compared with both control groups for immediate attributions of source, but not for delayed attributions. Hallucinators showed a bias towards external attribution of emotional material for immediate source monitoring and all subjects showed a bias towards misattribution of positive material to an external source and negative material to an internal source for the delayed source monitoring task. CONCLUSIONS: These findings appear to be most consistent with theories proposing that hallucinations result from an external attributional bias for internal events. The implications of these results for research and practice are also discussed.     

Therapists' attributions for client premature termination: Are they self-serving?

We conducted two studies of therapist responses to client premature termination from psychotherapy. In Study 1, we surveyed therapists' attributions for client premature termination from therapy using an open response format. Results suggested that therapists showed a self-serving pattern in their attributions (i.e., attributed causality to the client or environment) when considering their own clients compared to when they considered the premature terminations of clients in general. Study 2 was a vignette study in which therapists responded to one of two client presentations that varied relationship to client (your client vs. other's client). Using the attributional categories derived from Study 1, therapists rated the likelihood that each attribution caused the client's premature termination. Again, patterns across groups indicated that therapists are self-serving in their attributions for client premature termination. In addition, differences were found across gender and theoretical orientation; larger effects were found for men compared to women, and psychoanalytic therapists compared to cognitive–behavioral. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's perceptions of their peer experiences: Attributions, loneliness, social anxiety, and social avoidance.

338 3rd and 5th graders completed a sociometric questionnaire and 3 instruments designed to assess their feelings of loneliness, social anxiety, social avoidance, and their attributions for social outcomes. Results show that children's feelings and attributions varied as a function of peer status, gender, and grade. For example, compared with peers, rejected children reported higher levels of loneliness and were more likely to attribute relationship failures to external causes. Children's feelings were also significantly related to their attributions about social events. Popular, average, and controversial status children who were socially distressed exhibited a non-self-serving attributional style, whereas distressed rejected children exhibited a self-serving attributional pattern. Neglected children who were distressed exhibited elements of both of these attributional styles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Spontaneous" causal thinking.

Reviews 17 publications (including some containing multiple studies) on spontaneous attribution activity. The paradigms include the coding of written material, recording of thoughts during or after task completion, and indirect inferences of attributional activity exhibited in other cognitive processes. There is unequivocal documentation of attributional activity, with unexpected events and nonattainment of a goal among the antecedent cues that elicit causal search. It is concluded that the topic under investigation, therefore, should not be the existence of attributional search, but rather the conditions under which it is most promoted. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Construct of attributional style in depression and marital distress.

Although important theoretically, consistency in attribution responses or attributional style has rarely been investigated empirically. The responses of 150 couples were used to examine whether consistency of attribution responses within attribution dimensions and consistency in the pattern of responses across attribution dimensions were associated with adaptational outcomes. Replicating previous findings, mean attribution scores correlated with depression and with marital distress. Consistency of attribution responses was unrelated to either adaptational outcome, whereas (1) theoretically derived pessimistic and optimistic attribution patterns were related to depression scores and (2) benign and nonbenign marital attribution patterns were related to marital satisfaction scores. The implications of these findings for the level at which attributional style is best conceptualized are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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

Two experiments with 160 undergraduates studied 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) and its occasional, but systematic, reversal. In Exp I, high- but not low-social-anxiety Ss (selected by scores on the Social Anxiety subscale of the Self-Consciousness Scale) 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 Exp II, this reversal of the self-serving bias among high-social-anxiety Ss was replicated, and it was also found that both high- and low-social-anxiety Ss 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. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-serving biases in the attribution process: A reexamination of the fact or fiction question.

Examines the empirical evidence related to the notion of self-serving biases in causal attributions. D. T. Miller and M. Ross's (see record 1975-21041-001) reinterpretations of data that presumably reflect bias are discussed. The studies reviewed show relatively strong support for the causal asymmetry generally cited as evidence for self-serving, or defensive, attributions. Futhermore, a broadened self-serving bias formulation is presented, which suggests that under certain conditions, esteem needs may be best served by making counterdefensive attributions. Conditions that may be expected to elicit defensive or counterdefensive attributions are delineated. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)