UNASSIGNED: People are generally characterized by a self-serving bias which describes the tendency to ascribe positive outcomes or success to internal or personal causes (self-enhancement motivation) and ascribe negative outcomes or failure to external or situational causes (self-protection motivation). It has been found that the individuals with internet gaming disorder (IGD) who have low self-esteem and high depression exhibit an attenuated self-serving bias. However, the relationships among self-esteem, depression and self-serving bias are not clearly identified.
UNASSIGNED: A sample of 138 IGD participants completed self-esteem and depression scales and a causal attribution task (Study 1) to examine the relationships among self-esteem, depression and self-serving bias (both self-enhancement and self-protection). In follow-up Study 2, 28 IGD participants were recruited to undertake self-affirmation intervention which can affirm one\'s sense of global self-view and bolster self-esteem to explore whether self-affirmation would trigger a reduction of depression and a raise of self-serving bias.
UNASSIGNED: The results of path analysis in Study 1 showed that the self-serving bias was predicted by self-esteem and depression, and the depression played a mediating role between self-esteem and self-serving bias. The results of Study 2 showed that the IGD participants reported higher self-esteem, lower depression and engaged in more self-protection motivation after affirming-self manipulation as compared with affirming-other manipulation.
UNASSIGNED: These findings suggest that self-esteem predicts self-serving bias through depression and self-affirmation could trigger an increase of self-esteem, further decrease depression and improve self-serving bias for the individuals with IGD. The present article clearly identified the relationships among these factors and provided a new approach to promote positive self-concept in individuals with IGD. Future research is warranted to explore the lasting benefits of self-affirmation on domains of education, relationships and gaming withdrawal for the individuals with IGD among different populations.

Unethical behavior is discovered that is more contagious than ethical behavior. This article attempts to propose one of the possible underlying mechanisms-people may have underconfidence bias in information updating due to motivated reasoning, and such bias exhibits in a different direction compared to the overconfident bias documented in the literature on ethical environment, which generate the asymmetric pattern in contagion. This study designs an experiment which relates the unethical behavior to social learning, where a series of subjects with private information about penalty decide sequentially whether to conduct unethical behavior publicly. This study adopts a quantal response equilibrium to construct a structural model for estimation of the bias. In total, 162 university students participated in our experiment and the results confirm the asymmetric patterns that people rely more on others\' precedent decisions rather than their private signal; therefore, the bias facilitates the contagion. This study also tests two punishment systems in the experiment and the results suggest a policy: slightly increasing penalties for the \"followers\" in the early stages would effectively suppress the contagion.

Previous research has mostly focused on Internet use behaviors, such as usage time of the Internet or social media after individuals experienced offline social exclusion. However, the extant literature has ignored online response behaviors, such as online review responses to social exclusion. To address this gap, drawing on self-protection and self-serving bias, we proposed three hypotheses that examine the effect of offline social exclusion on online reviews, which are verified by two studies using different simulating scenarios with 464 participants. The results show that when individuals are socially excluded offline, regardless of where the exclusion comes from (businesses or peers), they will be more likely to give negative online reviews. In addition, brand awareness moderates the effect of offline social exclusion on online reviews. Specifically, if the brand is less known, compared with social inclusion, offline social exclusion will lead individuals to give more negative online reviews; conversely, for well-known brands, no significant difference exists in the online reviews between social exclusion and inclusion.

To protect and maintain the positivity of self-concept, normal people usually show a self-serving bias (internal attribution of positive events and external attribution of negative events) by the motives of self-enhancement and self-protection. Additionally, self-serving assessments predominantly activate the subcortical-cortical midline structures (CMS) in healthy individuals. However, little is known about self-serving bias and its underlying neural correlates among individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD).
Twenty-four participants with IGD and 25 recreational Internet gaming users (RGUs) were scanned while attributing the causes of positive/negative self- and other-related events that could occur in both the game-world and real-world contexts. Region-of-interest (within CMS regions) and parametric analysis were performed to investigate the neural correlates of self-serving bias in IGD.
Behaviorally, the IGD participants attributed more negative and fewer positive events to themselves than RGU participants in both contexts. Neurally, during the attributions of negative events, the IGD participants exhibited increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation in both contexts compared with RGU participants. Higher vmPFC activation was associated with weaker self-protective motivation in the IGD group. Meanwhile, during the attributions of positive events, the IGD participants exhibited decreased precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex activation in the real world compared with RGU participants. Parametric analysis showed a reduced positive correlation between precuneus activation and self-attribution ratings of positive events in the real world in the IGD group relative to the RGU group.
These results suggest that individuals with IGD show an attenuated self-serving bias and altered brain activity within CMS regions involved in self-attribution, providing evidence for the negative self-concept and weakened abilities in both self-enhancement and self-protection in IGD.

Major depression disorder (MDD) is characterized by the lack of self-serving bias, which may inherently underlie the onset and maintenance of depression. Emerging neuroimaging evidences have indicated that the altered self-processing in MDD may be germane to the dysfunctional static resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although static RSFC studies provide tremendous amounts of evidences on functional changes in depression, explorations of dynamic RSFC among the PFC and other brain regions may elucidate the temporal changes of neural activities associated with depression. To further explore the behavioral and neural correlates of self-serving bias, 21 depressed and 23 non-depressed individuals underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan and completed a self-serving bias task. Static and dynamic RSFC analyses were conducted for specific subregions of the PFC, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the ventral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex. Depressed patients showed an attenuated self-serving bias as compared with controls, and aberrant static and dynamic RSFC among these subregions of the PFC. In particular, the self-serving bias was associated with static dmPFC-to-OFC RSFC and dynamic vlPFC-to-OFC RSFC for MDD group. The aberrant RSFC of the PFC may serve as a predictor for self-serving bias in depression.

Performance monitoring plays a virtual role in individual reinforcement learning. However, it remains unclear how responsibility attribution modulates the individual monitoring process in a social cooperative context. In the present study, 46 participants received feedback on the team\'s monetary outcome, teammate performance, and their own performance sequentially for a two-person task. Using event-related potential (ERP), we analyze brain activity in response to performance monitoring during team and self feedback, indexed according to reward positivity (RewP). Overall, the participants reported a modest tendency towards causal attribution in terms of taking more responsibility for negative rather than positive team-feedback, thus indicating an opposite pattern to the so-called self-serving bias phenomenon. Based on post-experiment responsibility attribution, participants were further divided into a \'Modest\' group (N = 23) who reported more responsibility for team failure than success, and an \'Ordinary\' group (N = 23) who made comparable attribution irrespective of team outcome. The ERP results show that there is no difference in RewP amplitudes between the two groups when the participants were processing the team\'s monetary feedback. However, the observed RewP amplitudes are notably different in the Modest group when processing self-performance feedback at different levels of responsibility attribution. These findings demonstrate that neural activity during performance monitoring does not differ between the two groups. However, using different responsibility attribution tendencies does affect brain activity during individual performance monitoring. The observed RewP effect sheds light on the automatic and implicit evaluation of one\'s own performance in a social cooperative context.

Traditionally, the self-serving bias has been investigated in ambiguous contexts in which participants work on tasks that measure novel abilities before making attributions without clear criteria for success or failure feedback. Prior studies have confirmed that the self-serving bias is pervasive in the general population, yet it varies significantly across situations involving ambiguous contexts. The present study features an unambiguous context encompassing interpersonal events that involved implicit causality (with the \"self\" as an actor or recipient), the inherent logic of which indicated attribution criteria. The aim of this study was to explore whether there is a self-serving bias in unambiguous contexts and to examine whether it is as sensitive to situation as it has been shown to be in ambiguous contexts. The results showed that, in an unambiguous context, participants exhibited self-serving bias in relation to attribution associated with negative interpersonal events. Additionally, the self-serving bias was greater in the actor condition relative to the recipient condition (Study 1), and this effect was not affected by the level of self-awareness, which was manipulated by the use or otherwise of a camera during the experiment (Study 2). Our findings provide evidence for the existence of the self-serving bias in unambiguous contexts. Moreover, the self-serving bias was shown to be immune to situation in unambiguous contexts, but it did depend on factors associated with the events per se, such as the actor versus recipient role that the self played in interpersonal events.