Attribution in Groups

Group members'estimations oftheircontributions to a collective endeavorwere investigated by assessing perceptions of responsibility following completion of an additive group task. As an information-processing approach to attributions in groups suggests, only those who performed well at the individual level internalized success and externalized failure. Those who failed tended to take more responsibility for their group s failure rather than success. Group members also displayed a group-serving tendency; they gave more responsibility to others after success rather than failure. The results suggest that attributional asymmetries following group performance may result from group members' exaggeratedly positive appraisals of their personal competencies.

Self-Threat Magnifies the Self-Serving Bias: A Meta-Analytic Integration

Experiments testing the self-serving bias (SSB; taking credit for personal success but blaming external factors for personal failure) have used a multitude of moderators (i.e., role, task importance, outcome expectancies, self-esteem, achievement motivation, self-focused attention, task choice, perceived task difficulty, interpersonal orientation, status, affect, locus of control, gender, and task type). The present meta-analytic review established the viability and pervasiveness of the SSB and, more important, organized the 14 moderators just listed under the common theoretical umbrella of self-threat. According to the self-threat model, the high self-threat level of each moderator is associated with a larger display of the SSB than the low self-threat level. The model was supported: Self-threat magnifies the SSB.