Among friends? An examination of friendship and the self-serving bias.
Do friends bound each other's self-enhancement tendencies? Do friends display the self-serving bias (SSB; i.e. taking individual credit for success but blaming a partner for failure)? Dyads consisting of either friends or strangers engaged in an interdependent-outcomes creativity test, received bogus success or failure feedback at the dyadic level, and made responsibility attributions for the joint test performance. Strangers displayed the SSB. Friends, in contrast, refrained from the SSB: they shared responsibility for both successful and unsuccessful test outcomes. Friendship does place boundaries on self-enhancement.
Campbell
W K
WK
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA. wkc@po.cwru.edu
Sedikides
C
C
Reeder
G D
GD
Elliot
A J
AJ
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009820:Ohio; D012927:Social Control, Informal; D012932:Social Facilitation