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

Two experiments were conducted to provide evidence concerning the contribu-tion 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 experi-menter 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 com-mittee evaluation in eliciting "honest " responses from subjects only reached sig-nificance for low-social-anxiety subjects). These findings are discussed in terms of the varying self-presentation strategies and differing self-concepts of individ-uals high and low in social anxiety, as well as the self-presentation component to apparently self-enhancing and self-effacing causal attributions for performance. The term selj-presentation refers to the manner in which individuals plan, adopt, and carry out strategies for managing the impres-sions they make on others. There is a growing interest in this approach to the analysis of interpersonal relations. Self-presentation in-terpretations of such traditional social psycho-logical topics as group decision making (e.g.