New paper from our collaboration project together with Prof. Tobias Kube has been published in Communications Psychology!
Headed by Annalina Mayer and Laura Müller-Pinzler, we published a new study using the Learning Of Own Performance (LOOP) task, now in a modified way. We show why some people embrace their successes while others dismiss them as luck.
To study this, we combined computational modeling with a feedback-learning experiment featuring two unusual characters: an 😇 angel robot and a 😈 devil robot. Participants repeatedly received performance feedback and had to decide whether it reflected their own performance or whether one of the robots had manipulated the outcome. This allowed us to track, trial by trial, how attributions influence learning from feedback.
Three key findings emerged:
🔹 People learned substantially less from feedback they believed was externally caused.
🔹 Individuals with lower self-esteem and higher depressive symptoms showed a stronger negativity bias, learning more from setbacks than from successes (confirming earlier studies from our group).
🔹 Participants with higher self-esteem displayed a classic self-serving attributional bias: they were more likely to claim positive feedback as reflecting their own ability and to discount negative feedback as externally caused.
These findings suggest that self-beliefs are shaped not only by the feedback we receive, but also by how we explain where that feedback comes from. For individuals struggling with low self-esteem or depressive symptoms, this may create a double challenge: negative feedback has a stronger impact, while positive feedback is less likely to be integrated into the self-concept.
Check out the paper!
Abstract:
Healthy individuals typically attribute success to internal and failure to external factors, while people with depression and low self-esteem tend to do the opposite. At the same time, depression and low self-esteem are associated with negatively biased self-related learning and self-beliefs. Here, we used a validated self-related learning task to investigate how internal versus external attributions of performance feedback affect the formation of self-beliefs about ability and how these processes relate to depressive symptoms and self-esteem. Drawing on a computational model that incorporates prediction error valence and causal attributions, we found that participants updated their ability beliefs less when feedback was attributed to external causes. Furthermore, individuals with higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem showed a stronger negativity bias in learning and lower self-esteem was linked to a reduced self-serving attributional bias. These findings provide insight into cognitive mechanisms associated with negative self-related ability beliefs and may help to inform our understanding of processes linked to depressive symptoms.