Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The "Unstinted Effort" Of Social Comparison : Biases In The Retrieval Of Behavior Among Depressives And Nondepressives, Michele Christine Fejfar

Master's Theses

The egocentric bias, peoples' tendency to view themselves as better than others, has been found to exist in many different domains (Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, & Samuelson, 1985). Fejfar, Proudfoot, Allison, and Beggan (1994) uncovered evidence supporting two components to the bias: the motivation to be egocentric and the construction of strategies to fulfill this motivation. In the present research, this model was used to determine the biases inherent in depressive (as opposed to nondepressive) cognitions by having subjects list good and bad behaviors performed by themselves and others. Subjects directly or indirectly compared themselves to others (to test the motivation …