Abstract

Population prevalence estimates of others' successes and failures at a task were used to assess self-serving biases in response to one's own success and failure. The strength of self-protective motives in reaction to failure feedback and self-enhancing motives in reaction to success feedback was assessed. Large biases based on self-protection motives were observed, in that failure subjects made higher estimates of others' failure and lower estimates of others' success than no-feedback control subjects. Biases based on self-enhancement were observed only for non-depressed subjects. In addition, nondepressed failure subjects showed generalized effects of the self-protection motive, as they evidenced larger false consensus biases than control subjects for task-unrelated attributes and beliefs. Finally, all motivational effects were considerably stronger for nondepressed than for depressed subjects. Implications for processes underlying biases in population prevalence estimates are discussed.

Keywords

PsychologyTask (project management)PopulationSocial psychologySelf-enhancementSelf-controlClinical psychologyDemographyEconomics

Affiliated Institutions

Related Publications

Publication Info

Year
1992
Type
article
Volume
18
Issue
5
Pages
631-642
Citations
55
Access
Closed

External Links

View on DOI.org

Social Impact

Altmetric
PlumX Metrics

Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions

Citation Metrics

55
OpenAlex

Cite This

Gina Agostinelli, Steven J. Sherman, Clark C. Presson et al. (1992). Self-Protection and Self-Enhancement Biases in Estimates of Population Prevalence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 18 (5) , 631-642. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167292185014

Identifiers

DOI
10.1177/0146167292185014