Negativity-bias in forming beliefs about own abilities.

ABSTRACT: During everyday interactions people constantly receive feedback on their behavior, which shapes their beliefs about themselves. While classic studies in the field of social learning suggest that people have a tendency to learn better from good news (positivity bias) when they perceive little opportunities to immediately improve their own performance, we show updating is biased towards negative information when participants perceive the opportunity to adapt their performance during learning. In three consecutive experiments we applied a computational modeling approach on the subjects' learning behavior and reveal the negativity bias was specific for learning about own compared to others' performances and was modulated by prior beliefs about the self, i.e. stronger negativity bias in individ

SUBMITTER: Muller-Pinzler L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6783436 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature