ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
Beyond self-serving bias: diffusion of responsibility reduces sense of agency and outcome monitoring.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Detection of Domestic Violence and Abuse by Community Mental Health Teams Using the BRAVE Intervention: A Multicenter, Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of interpersonal violence · 2022Trial
- Mobile App-Based Tracking of Daily Explicit and Implicit Sense of Agency Among Adults Living in Japan: Longitudinal Observational Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Observational
- The sense of agency is reduced by stimulus variability but has a limited effect on perceived variability.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Relational Responsibility: Bringing the Wider Social Environment into the Analysis.Asian bioethics review · 2026Article
- Effects of avoidance in German military police resilience training.Military psychology : the official journal of the Division of Military Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2026Article
- Mental health in challenging situations: how experienced agency affects coping and mental distress.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Post-loss speeding and neurophysiological markers of action preparation and outcome processing in probabilistic reversal learning.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Sensory Attenuation and Agency in Cooperative and Individual Contexts: Exploring the Role of Empathy in Action Perception.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- A cross-cultural EEG study of how obedience and conformity influence reconciliation intentions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The time course of Temporal Binding in social and nonsocial interactions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- ERP correlates of agency processing in joint action.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The impact of shared sense of agency and moral dispositions on intergroup dishonesty.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Radiation safety practices in neurosurgery: Exploring education gaps and concerns among physicians and trainees.Surgical neurology international · 2025Article
- Selfhood-attribution in a social context: further evidence for a Pars-Pro-Toto account.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Self-other distinction modulates the sense of self-agency during joint actions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- 'The Last Shot'-the shared and distinct brain regions involved in processing unexpectedness of success and failure in the context of social cooperation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- On the cognitive mechanisms supporting prosocial disobedience in a post-genocidal context.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Shared Responsibility Decreases the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mistakes strengthen the temporal binding effect in the context of goal-directed actions.Experimental brain research · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Diffusion of responsibility across agents has been proposed to underlie decreased helping and increased aggression in group behaviour. However, few studies have directly investigated effects of the presence of other people on how we experience the consequences of our actions. This EEG study investigated whether diffusion of responsibility simply reflects a post-hoc self-serving bias, or rather has direct effects on how we process the outcomes of our actions, and our experience of agency over them. Participants made voluntary actions whose outcomes were more or less negative. Presence of another potential agent reduced participants' sense of agency over those outcomes, even though it was always obvious who caused each outcome. Further, presence of another agent reduced the amplitude of feedback-related negativity evoked by outcome stimuli, suggesting reduced outcome monitoring. The presence of other agents may lead to diffusion of responsibility by weakening the neural linkage between one's actions and their outcomes.
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