Accentuate the positive: Evidence that context dependent self-reference drives self-bias

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Cognition demonstrates a self-bias, prioritizing self-relevant information.
• A positivity-bias also exists, prioritizing positively valenced information.
• The interaction between self-bias and positivity-bias remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relative primacy of self-bias and positivity-bias.
• To determine if these biases interact or if one is prioritized.
• To understand the contextual flexibility of cognitive biases.

Main Methods:

• A classification task was employed to pair self-relevant information with emotional expressions or reward cues.
• Experiment 1 paired self-information with facial expressions (positive vs. neutral).
• Experiment 2 paired self-information with reward cues (high vs. low).

Main Results:

• When self-information was paired with positive stimuli (smiling faces, high reward), self-bias was evident, but positivity-bias was not.
• When self-information was paired with less positive stimuli (neutral faces, low reward), positivity-bias emerged, while self-bias did not.
• These findings indicate that the prioritization of information is context-dependent.

Conclusions:

• The relative primacy of self-bias and positivity-bias is not fixed but flexible and context-dependent.
• This flexibility may stem from an underlying drive for self-enhancement.
• The self-positivity bias could explain the observed interaction between self-relevance and valence.