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

Abstract

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.