Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

SPSP Annual Meeting 2010

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by McCarrey, M.
Right arrow Articles by Rozario, W.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by McCarrey, M.
Right arrow Articles by Rozario, W.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Ego-Relevant Feedback, Affect, and Self-Serving Attributional Bias

Michael McCarrey

University of Ottawa

Henry P. Edwards

University of Ottawa

Wilson Rozario

University of Ottawa

The possibility, that people have a need to self-enhance or self-protect via their attributions of causality following success or failure was examined by experimentally inducing more positive or more negative affect following each. A sample of 60 people who succeeded and 60 people who failed an anagram task randomly received positive ego-enhancing feedback, negative ego-diminishing feedback, or no feedback, concerning a prior unrelated task. Results indicated that when affect had been increased there was a reduced tendency to attribute recent success to internal factors (ability' or effort) and a reduced tendency to attribute recent failure to external factors (luck or task difficulty). When affect had been reduced, however, there was a greater tendency' to attribute successful outcome internally and failure externally. The results are interpreted as supporting the existence of a systematic relationship among ego-relevant feedback, affect, and self-attribution following success and failure such that a motivational bias is operative.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 8, No. 2, 189-194 (1982)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167282082001
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?