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)