No Self-Serving Bias in Therapists' Evaluations of Clients’ Premature Treatment Termination. An approximate replication of Murdock et al. (2010).

DOI

In an often-cited study, Murdock et al. (2010) found that therapists are more likely to attribute premature treatment termination to client characteristics than to themselves, a finding that the authors interpreted in terms of a Self-Serving Bias (SSB). We replicated and extended the study of Murdock et al. (2010, study 2). Psychologists and psychotherapists (N = 91) read two case vignettes about premature treatment terminations of clients that, in a between-subjects set-up, were either described as own clients or other therapists’ clients. Next, participants used three attribution subscales (blaming therapist, client, and situation) to evaluate potential causes for the premature terminations. This way, we tested whether participants would manifest SSB. We also investigated whether therapists’ scores on self-confidence and need for closure were linked to SSB tendencies. Unlike Murdock et al. (2010), we found no overall SSB. However, a stronger need for closure was related to more SSB tendencies (i.e., less endorsement of “blame therapist” attributions) in the own-client-condition (r = -.35, p <.05, r2 = .12), but not in the other-therapist’s-client-condition (r = .17, p = .27). Our results suggest that SSB is not a ubiquitous phenomenon when therapists evaluate premature termination problems and that their willingness to attend to their own role depends to some extent on their need for closure.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/8QNWZC
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/8QNWZC
Provenance
Creator Dandachi-FitzGerald, Brechje ORCID logo; Meijs, Laura; Moonen, Isabelle M.A.J.; Merckelbach, Harald ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Dandachi-FitzGerald, Brechje; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Dandachi-FitzGerald, Brechje (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 659418
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences