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Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.

ABSTRACT: A large body of social psychological research suggests that we think quite positively of ourselves, often unrealistically so. Research on this 'self-positivity bias' has relied mainly on self-report and behavioral measures, but these can suffer from a number of problems including confounds that arise from the desire to present oneself well. What has not been clearly assessed is whether the self-positivity bias influences the processing of incoming information as it unfolds in real time. In this study, we used event-related potentials to address this question. Participants read two-sentence social vignettes that were either self- or other-relevant. Pleasant words in self-relevant contexts evoked a smaller negativity between 300 and 500 ms (the N400 time window) than the same words in other-relevant contexts, suggesting that comprehenders were more likely to expect positive information when a scenario referred to themselves. This finding indicates that the self-positivity bias is available online, acting as a general schema that directly influences real-time comprehension.

SUBMITTER: Fields EC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4560939 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.

Fields Eric C EC Kuperberg Gina R GR

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20150119 9

A large body of social psychological research suggests that we think quite positively of ourselves, often unrealistically so. Research on this 'self-positivity bias' has relied mainly on self-report and behavioral measures, but these can suffer from a number of problems including confounds that arise from the desire to present oneself well. What has not been clearly assessed is whether the self-positivity bias influences the processing of incoming information as it unfolds in real time. In this ...[more]

PMID: 25605967

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Dataset Information

Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.

Publications

Loving yourself more than your neighbor: ERPs reveal online effects of a self-positivity bias.

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