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Do Messages about Health Risks Threaten the Self? Increasing the Acceptance of Threatening Health Messages Via Self-Affirmation

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Abstract

Two studies demonstrate that self-image maintenance processes affect the acceptance of personally relevant health messages. Participants who completed a self-affirmation were less defensive and more accepting of health information. In Study 1, female participants (high vs. low relevance) read an article linking caffeine consumption to breast cancer. High-relevance women rejected the information more than did low-relevance women; however, affirmed high-relevance women accepted the information and intended to change their behavior accordingly. In Study 2, sexually active participants viewed an AIDS educational video; affirmed participants saw themselves at greater risk for HIV and purchased condoms more often than did nonaffirmed participants. Results suggest that health messages can threaten an individual’s self-image and that self-affirming techniques can increase the effectiveness of health information and lead to positive health behaviors.

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... Moreover, from a homeostatic view, this tendency should be less pronounced when the need for positive self-regard is satiated, and it should be more pronounced when the need for positive self-regard is deprived (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Hence, people who feel relatively positive about themselves should be less prone to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject beliefincongruent information because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation and avoiding self-threat (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should have a stronger tendency to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject belief-incongruent information because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). ...
... Hence, people who feel relatively positive about themselves should be less prone to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject beliefincongruent information because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation and avoiding self-threat (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should have a stronger tendency to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject belief-incongruent information because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Together, these assumptions suggest that positive selffeelings should be negatively associated with belief bias favoring attitude-congruent over attitude-incongruent information. ...
... Counter to predictions derived from motivational accounts of belief-congruency bias (see Ditto et al., in press), we did not find evidence for a negative association between positive self-feelings and beliefcongruency bias. According to motivational accounts, people who feel more positive about themselves should be less prone to showing a belief-congruency bias because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation or avoiding self-threat (Gawronski et al., 2023;Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should be more prone to showing a belief-congruency bias because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self. ...
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An analysis drawing on Signal Detection Theory suggests that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they tend to accept information with a particular slant regardless of whether it is true or false (belief bias). Three preregistered experiments with participants from the United States and the United Kingdom (N = 961) revealed that (i) truth insensitivity in responses to (mis)information about COVID-19 vaccines differed as a function of prior attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines; (ii) participants exhibited a strong belief bias favoring attitude-congruent information; (iii) truth insensitivity and belief bias jointly predicted acceptance of false information about COVID-19 vaccines, but belief bias was a much stronger predictor; (iv) cognitive elaboration increased truth sensitivity without reducing belief bias; and (v) higher levels of confidence in one's beliefs were associated with greater belief bias. The findings provide insights into why people fall for misinformation, which is essential for individual-level interventions to reduce susceptibility to misinformation.
... Moreover, from a homeostatic view, this tendency should be less pronounced when the need for positive self-regard is satiated, and it should be more pronounced when the need for positive self-regard is deprived (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Hence, people who feel relatively positive about themselves should be less prone to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject beliefincongruent information because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation and avoiding self-threat (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should have a stronger tendency to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject belief-incongruent information because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). ...
... Hence, people who feel relatively positive about themselves should be less prone to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject beliefincongruent information because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation and avoiding self-threat (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should have a stronger tendency to readily accept belief-congruent information and reject belief-incongruent information because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Together, these assumptions suggest that positive selffeelings should be negatively associated with belief bias favoring attitude-congruent over attitude-incongruent information. ...
... Counter to predictions derived from motivational accounts of belief-congruency bias (see Ditto et al., in press), we did not find evidence for a negative association between positive self-feelings and beliefcongruency bias. According to motivational accounts, people who feel more positive about themselves should be less prone to showing a belief-congruency bias because they do not need to regulate their self-feelings by seeking self-validation or avoiding self-threat (Gawronski et al., 2023;Liberman & Chaiken, 1992;Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, people who feel less positive about themselves should be more prone to showing a belief-congruency bias because doing so helps to elevate positive feelings about the self. ...
Article
Full-text available
An analysis drawing on Signal Detection Theory suggests that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they tend to accept information with a particular slant regardless of whether it is true or false (belief bias). Three preregistered experiments with participants from the United States and the United Kingdom (N = 961) revealed that (i) truth insensitivity in responses to (mis)information about COVID-19 vaccines differed as a function of prior attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines; (ii) participants exhibited a strong belief bias favoring attitude-congruent information; (iii) truth insensitivity and belief bias jointly predicted acceptance of false information about COVID-19 vaccines, but belief bias was a much stronger predictor; (iv) cognitive elaboration increased truth sensitivity without reducing belief bias; and (v) higher levels of confidence in one’s beliefs were associated with greater belief bias. The findings provide insights into why people fall for misinformation, which is essential for individual-level interventions to reduce susceptibility to misinformation.
... In another similar experiment concerning health, self-affirmation increased the perception of risk in a group of female heavy drinkers (Sherman et al., 2000). ...
... In Experiment 2, we expected to find a null effect of both positive and negative self-affirmation on the average expected value of accepted gambles. This prediction is in line with studies that show that positive self-affirmation had no effect on self-reported mood (Fein & Spencer, 1997;Schmeichel & Martens, 2005;Sherman et al., 2000;Spencer et al., 2001) and those who show that these types of manipulations have no effect on people who do not experience marginalization (Hall et al., 2014;Steele et al., 1993). ...
... Multiple reasons can explain this. First, we know from past findings (Chandrasekhar et al., 2018;Sherman et al., 2000) that self-affirmation increases risk perception in vulnerable participants. If this is the case, the poor participants in our sample assigned to the positive and negative self-affirmation treatments might have perceived the lotteries as riskier and thus decided to reject a larger proportion of them. ...
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The burden of poverty is caused by both material deprivation and the psychological threat associated with it. Poverty has been found to diminish cognitive ability and cause the poor to forego beneficial programs. In the present study, we examined how exacerbating the psychological burden of poverty through an intervention that asked participants to recall a negative personal experience that made them feel unsuccessful influences the rate of acceptance of mixed gambles. Mixed gambles yield both gains and losses and simulate choices in life that contain both a risk of loss and an opportunity for gain. A second group of participants was asked to recall a positive personal experience that made them feel successful or proud, while a third group was not assigned any recall task. Experiment 1 targeted the intervention to a group of people living in extreme poverty in Kenya. Experiment 2 replicated the study in a group of non-poor students in Italy. Experiment 3 replicated the study online with a heterogeneous sample of people living in the United Kingdom. Results showed that recalling a negative life experience significantly reduced the average expected value of the accepted gambles. Recalling a positive life experience also significantly reduced the average expected value of accepted bets, although to a lesser extent. However, the treatments only affected poor individuals (Experiment 1), whereas non-poor individuals (Experiments 2 and 3) were immune to this effect. In addition, neither education nor cognitive ability was found to mediate the effect. These findings show that the burden of poverty can increase loss aversion, discouraging the poor from accepting risky investments with a positive expected value that could help them escape poverty in the long run, such as investments in personal education, small businesses, or retirement plans.
... For example, Harris and Napper (2005) demonstrated that among participants with the highest levels of alcohol consumption (i.e., those at greatest risk), completing a self-affirmation before reading an article that linked alcohol use with breast cancer reduced defensive processing. Affirmations have also been shown to increase personal acceptance and perceived relevance of threatening messages (Sherman et al., 2000;Sparks et al., 2010;Wenzel et al., 2020), reduce derogation of threatening messages (Armitage et al., 2011;van Koningsbruggen & Das, 2009), reduce psychological discomfort associated with threats (Steele & Liu, 1983), and increase willingness to change behaviours (Armitage et al., 2011;Graham-Rowe et al., 2019). Finally, self-affirmations have also been effective at lessening the impact of negative psychological barriers experienced by students in certain educational contexts (Borman et al., 2018(Borman et al., , 2022Easterbrook et al., 2021;Hadden et al., 2020;Sherman et al., 2021;Turetsky et al., 2020;Wu et al., 2021), but it is possible that they may also be useful tools in reducing teachers' defensiveness about personal bias. ...
... Self-affirmation manipulation. The self-affirmation condition involved a similar activity to that used in various studies (e.g., Harris & Napper, 2005;Sherman et al., 2000). Participants were shown a list of twelve values (i.e., honesty, kindness, creativity) and were asked to write down a value -either from the list or one of their own choosing -that was the most important to them and give three reasons for this. ...
... The largely null effects of the self-affirmation manipulation raise questions about the efficacy of the manipulation itself and the context in which it was delivered (Ferrer & Cohen, 2019). Unlike much of the original self-affirmation literature, which has yielded encouraging results (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000;Harris & Napper, 2005;Sherman et al., 2000;Steele, 1988), the current study was carried out online. Although some research has suggested that online environments provide a reliable complement to in-person studies (Arechar et al., 2018), much research has pointed to issues with careless responding in online studies due to participant (dis)engagement, environmental distraction, and lack of social contact with the researcher (Francavilla et al., 2019;Meade & Craig, 2012;Nayak & Narayan, 2019). ...
Article
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Teachers’ judgements and interactions may be influenced by the backgrounds of their students, yet research shows that they may be reluctant to accept evidence relating to such biases. We investigated teachers’ perceptions of their own and others’ biases and explored whether a brief self-affirmation manipulation—which tends to reduce defensive responding— could increase their acknowledgement of personal and institutional bias. UK-based teachers (N = 288) completed either a values affirmation or control task before reading a mildly threatening research-based article about unconscious bias in education. Overall, teachers exhibited a bias blind spot, whereby they were more likely to perceive unconscious bias as an issue for other teachers to contend with rather than as a concern for themselves. Self-affirmed teachers were more likely to agree to have their teaching filmed to explore if/where personal biases may exist. Nevertheless, the self-affirmation did not alter levels of overall acceptance of the issue or perceptions of personal relevance. Exploratory analyses suggested that greater support for equity-enhancing teaching practices among teachers was associated with increased acknowledgement of bias and support for anti-bias initiatives. The findings suggest that self-affirmation may offer limited scope for improving acknowledgement of biases and that more work needs to be done to challenge and change the narrative of prejudice in schooling, from one that concerns only a few ‘bad apples’ to one that is accepted as an issue for all educators to be aware of and responsible for.
... However, these opportunities and incentives do not guarantee that people will procure condoms and get tested; psychological barriers may stand in the way. People tend to respond defensively to information that suggests their behavior puts them at risk of negative health outcomes [4]. Downplaying the risk of contracting HIV, FSWs may be reluctant to engage in health-protective behaviors, such as using condoms or getting tested. ...
... As we review below, self-affirmation is a well-studied intervention in social-and health-psychology literature. [4,20,21] It protects people's sense of self-worth and can increase their inclination to engage in protective behaviors that acknowledge personal health risks-particularly when paired with information about how to effectively manage their health (i.e., self-efficacy information) [20,22]. Thus, we predicted that self-affirmation could lead FSWs to (a) perceive themselves as being at higher risk of contracting HIV, (b) demonstrate stronger intentions to use condoms, and (c) take an HIV test, particularly after receiving information about how they could effectively manage their health if they were to test positive for HIV. ...
... For example, US undergraduates who were randomly assigned to reflect on a personally important (vs. unimportant) value subsequently reported that they were at higher risk of contracting HIV, and took more free condoms at the end of the study [4]. These results comport with the conclusion of a meta-analysis of 144 experimental tests: self-affirmation can increase people's acceptance of information about health risks, intentions to improve healthy behavior, and actual behavior change [25,36]. ...
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We test an intervention aiming to increase condom usage and HIV testing in a stigmatized population at high risk of contracting HIV: female sex workers (FSWs) in Senegal. Some sex work is legal in Senegal, and condoms and HIV tests are freely available to registered FSWs—but FSWs may be reluctant to get tested and use condoms, in part because doing so would entail acknowledging their risk of contracting HIV and potentially expose them to stigma. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we hypothesized that reflecting on a source of personal pride would help participants acknowledge their risk of HIV, intend to use condoms more frequently, and take an HIV test. Prior research suggests that similar self-affirmation interventions can help people acknowledge their health risks and improve their health behavior, especially when paired with information about effectively managing their health (i.e., self-efficacy information). However, such interventions have primarily been tested in the United States and United Kingdom, and their generalizability outside of these contexts is unclear. Our high-powered experiment randomly assigned participants (N = 592 FSWs; N = 563 in the final analysis) to a self-affirmation condition or a control condition and measured their risk perceptions, whether they took condoms offered to them, and whether (after randomly receiving or not receiving self-efficacy information) they took an HIV test. We found no support for any of our hypotheses. We discuss several explanations for these null results based on the stigma attached to sex work and HIV, cross-cultural generalizability of self-affirmation interventions, and robustness of previous findings. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10461-023-04039-7.
... Instead of being random required to choose a healthy behavior, connecting it to values positively impacts achieving ultimate behavioral goals [27]. Additionally, people who received inductive messages intended to raise self-enhancement value rated that they are at higher risk for HIV and showed higher intention to purchase condoms and to take education programs than people who did not receive self-enhancement messages [28]. As an element of message tailoring, discounts can be directly reflected to help one accomplish one's own goal in the self-management of diabetes. ...
... A previous study tested the relationship triggering personal value orientation and behavioral outcomes. The study found that a participant who received a message triggering personal value orientation could link health behavior with ultimate consequences and felt more control over their behavior [28]. Recalling personal value orientation leads one to think more critically about one's behavior and exert more control over one's behavior. ...
... Recalling personal value orientation leads one to think more critically about one's behavior and exert more control over one's behavior. Triggering personal value orientation improves one's ability to link the value to decision-making and increases a specific behavioral intention (Figure 1) [28]. ...
Chapter
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User-generated content and platforms on personal health management through apps are commonly used these days as individuals can share their information with others and customize the platform of any media or software/website by their information gathering patterns. For example, a 7-year-old boy familiar with YouTube may view some subscribed channels to learn more about the gummy bear vitamin he takes daily. However, an 80-year-old woman may have trouble gathering information about the 50+ women’s vitamin products and whether it is okay to take them without conflicting with her current health condition, unless she calls her health providers or visits a local pharmacy directly. Likewise, this chapter will further discuss the effectiveness of individual behavioral changes by tailored messages with individual differences. An experimental study will be introduced, exploring individual differences to examine health messages. Ultimately, with differences in value orientation, we can consider constructing individualized or tailored health messages. Therefore, more effective ways of creating tailored health messages for technology-based health management interventions will be considered, helping self-management of chronic diseases.
... However, charity advertisements featuring AI-generated images of the communicator may harm consumers' donation intentions [40]. Third, characteristics of the receiver include factors such as the mood of the PSA viewer [42] and the target group of the PSA (e.g., whether the viewers engage in the misbehavior identified in the PSA or not) [43]. For example, consumers who engage in the misbehavior mentioned in the PSA (e.g., smokers) are more likely to show reactance or defensive responses to the anti-smoking PSAs compared to non-smokers, especially to those with negative or threatening information [43]. ...
... Third, characteristics of the receiver include factors such as the mood of the PSA viewer [42] and the target group of the PSA (e.g., whether the viewers engage in the misbehavior identified in the PSA or not) [43]. For example, consumers who engage in the misbehavior mentioned in the PSA (e.g., smokers) are more likely to show reactance or defensive responses to the anti-smoking PSAs compared to non-smokers, especially to those with negative or threatening information [43]. ...
Article
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Despite the growing use of virtual influencers in communicating public service announcements (PSAs), their PSA communication effectiveness remains underexplored. Virtual influencers are digital entities who generate content on social media to establish a digital identity and personal brand. This research examines the effectiveness of virtual (vs. human) influencers in conveying PSAs, focusing on consumers’ attitudes toward the influencers and their acceptance of PSA messages. Three experimental studies (N = 1429) spanning different cultural contexts reveal that consumers hold a less favorable attitude toward virtual (vs. human) influencers who post PSAs. Nevertheless, virtual influencers are equally effective as human influencers in influencing consumers’ acceptance of PSA messages. Dual-mediation processes involving mind perception and novelty perception are identified. Furthermore, we find that incorporating emotional appeal can enhance the effectiveness of virtual (vs. human) influencers’ PSA communications. These findings contribute to the literature on virtual influencer marketing and PSA marketing, offering practical insights for leveraging virtual influencers in PSA campaigns.
... Research suggests that people may choose to avoid information when such information (1) threatens current beliefs about the self, other people, or the world, (2) creates an obligation to act, or (3) causes negative emotions [7]. For instance, learning that one's risk for cancer is high threatens an individuals' beliefs that they are healthy, requires them to adopt appropriate health behaviors and adhere to treatment regimens, and may arouse negative affect [5,[7][8]. Concerns about experiencing negative emotions accounted for information avoidance across various medical conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, HIV, Huntington's disease, and breast and ovarian cancer [9][10][11][12]. Faced with these consequences of learning health information, many individuals adopt a mindset that "ignorance is bliss" [13]. ...
... A typical self-affirmation exercise involves selecting personally important values from a list, writing a brief essay explaining the reason for the choice, and elaborating on a time when those values were important [15]. Across three studies, Howell and Shepperd found that self-affirmation exercises were effective in reducing avoidance of personal risk information for a fictitious disease [16] (see also ref [8]). However, self-affirmation may be difficult to implement in medical settings. ...
Article
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Background Although learning health information is beneficial for physical well-being, many people opt to avoid learning this information due to its potentially threatening nature. Such avoidance can lead to delays in seeking treatment. Purpose This study tested the effectiveness of a self-regulation technique, mental contrasting (MC), specifically MC of a negative future with a positive current reality, in reducing health information avoidance regarding skin cancer (melanoma). We hypothesized that participants who engaged in MC would be more likely to choose to learn about their melanoma risk than those who completed a control, reflection activity. Methods We conducted a randomized controlled trial (N = 354). Participants were assigned to complete a MC or reflection (control) exercise prior to filling out a melanoma risk calculator. Participants were then asked whether they wanted to learn their melanoma risk, and how much information they would like to know. Results Chi-Square tests revealed that MC decreased melanoma risk information avoidance compared to the reflection activity (12% vs. 23.4%) but did not make participants more likely seek additional information. Conclusion MC is a brief, engaging, and effective strategy for reducing health information avoidance that could prove useful in medical settings.
... In Experiment 4 we sought to obtain further support for our theory by examining whether, in line with H4, priming consumers to feel better about themselves after experiencing sociomoral violations diminishes the desire to engage in angereliciting consumption (Fein and Spencer 1997;Matz and Wood 2005). To this end, we manipulated both whether participants experienced a sociomoral violation and whether they underwent a self-affirmation procedure (Schmeichel and Martens 2005;Sherman, Nelson, and Steele 2000;Steele and Liu 1983) before consumption. We predicted that participants who experienced a sociomoral violation but underwent a selfaffirmation intervention would feel sufficiently good about themselves, and therefore would be less likely to engage in anger-eliciting consumption, compared with participants who did not undergo such an intervention. ...
Article
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We are inundated with daily occurrences of discrimination and racism. Such events violate consumers' core moral values and can lead them to experience negative emotions and feelings of vulnerability. Surprisingly, instead of avoiding content that triggers additional negative feelings, many also actively seek out anger‐eliciting content. Drawing on the idea that anger can fulfill a positive psychic role, we suggest that consuming anger‐eliciting content can serve as a means of coping with sociomoral violations. In six experiments, we show that such violations enhance people's tendency to consume content they expect will make them angry. This effect occurs because anger serves to protect positive self‐perceptions following sociomoral violations; indeed, the effect is mediated by the desire to feel more valuable and attenuated when self‐perceptions are enhanced by alternative means. Our findings shed new light on how individuals might use consumption as a strategy to cope with sociomoral violations.
... According to Sherman et al. (2000), when coffee addicts were shown authoritative research that coffee could cause breast cancer, the self-affirmed group of coffee addicts showed stronger agreement with the message than those who were not self-affirmed. In another study of binge-drinking females, participants who had experienced self-affirmation were more open to information about the negative relationship between alcohol and liver health, and their alcohol consumption decreased (Harris & Napper, 2005). ...
Article
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We conducted two experiments to determine how the combination of task relevance, loss framing, and psychological distance affects changes in construal level, emotion intensity, and purchase intent. Experiment 1 investigated how construal level fit between the loss and proximal frames affected emotion intensity and purchase intention for skin beauty items among 217 female students in their 20s using the construal matching hypothesis (CMH). Experiment 2 examined how changes in construal level caused by the combination of task relevance and loss framing affect purchase intention among 41 female students in their 20s. We discovered that combining the loss and proximal frames boosted the emotional intensity of worry and raised purchase intention for low-concept marketed products. Meanwhile, the loss frame message produced a high construal level through self-affirmation in individuals with high task relevance, lowering purchase intention for advertising that emphasized tangible facts. We provide an in-depth discussion of the implications and limitations of our findings, as well as future research prospects.
... Furthermore, the influence of health risk perception on consumer behavior has also been confirmed. The perceived health risks and external threat-related health information individuals perceive in the social environment can affect their purchase decisions and behaviors [18,19]. Existing research indicates that individuals are more inclined to consume products and services that can help them reduce or alleviate health threats to cope with potential negative impacts [20]. ...
Article
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The perception of health risks can influence people’s health behaviors. However, in the context of modern consumer society, few people delve into in-depth discussions on health consumption as a form of health protection behavior. Inspired by the Health Belief Model and Protection Motivation Theory, this study interprets health consumption behavior as a new form of health protection behavior. A survey was conducted on a sample of Chinese youth (N = 885) to explore the mechanisms of action between health risk perception and health consumption behavior using structural equation modeling. The study found that: (1) health risk perception has a significant positive impact on the health consumption behavior of young people; (2) negative emotions and information seeking play mediating roles respectively in the mechanism of the impact of health risk perception on health consumption behavior; and (3) in addition to their individual mediating roles, negative emotions and information seeking behavior collectively play a chained mediation role in this process. Implications of these results, both theoretical and practical, are further discussed.
... Self-affirmation can spring from the defense of normative compliance with the sociomoral values of their culture. The transgression of moral values is a greater threat to individuals with negative thoughts about themselves than to those whose thoughts are self-validating (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000) consequently the former could react more severely. Meditation shows how a negative self-concept is only a thought; hence, it can reduce the need for self-affirmation as well as the severity of judgement and reactivity in defending moral values. ...
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The self-centrality principle holds that contemplative practices activate self-salience, encouraging moral self-enhancement, rather than the expected effect of acceptance hypothesized by the ego-quieting principle (Gebauer et al., 2018). However, meditation may favor ego-quieting by inhibiting the disposition to judge and/or react to defend more equanimously a self that feels threatened (Brown et al., 2007). In this study, we propose that meditation helps to reduce behaviors based on self-interest by limiting the defensive sense of the ego when the self is salient. We carry out three experimental studies to test this proposal. The first one tests the effect of meditation on a salient self with a proximal threat to their physical survival (N = 400). The second study tests the effect of meditation in the case of distal defensiveness in a salient self whose physical survival is threatened (N = 200). The third study evaluates the effect of proximal defensiveness when the integrity of the self-concept of the salient self is threatened (N = 200). Our results provide evidence that practicing meditation quiets the ego, or tends to do so, when attention is focused on a self-threatened by a context based on a thought.
... Por otro lado, las intervenciones autoafirmativas también han promovido la disminución de agresiones, una mayor apertura y mejor disposición frente a opiniones o críticas (Gu et al., 2019), favorables niveles de confianza y empatía hacia otros, además de un mayor desprendimiento de la percepción de injusticia (Stone et al., 2011). Además, se han identificado múltiples efectos positivos sobre el autoconcepto (Wakslak y Trope, 2009), valoración personal (Critcher y Dunning, 2015), autocompasión (Gregory et al., 2017) y bienestar consigo mismo (Sherman et al., 2000). ...
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Ante la creciente crisis de salud mental que afecta a los jóvenes, especialmente después de la pandemia, es imprescindible contar con estrategias efectivas para la promoción y prevención del bienestar en contextos educativos. Las intervenciones autoafirmativas son estrategias capaces de mitigar este impacto negativo y promover el bienestar en los estudiantes. Este estudio pretende aportar evidencia de la efectividad de estas intervenciones sobre la calidad de vida relacionada con la salud y el rendimiento académico en contextos educativos chilenos. Se utilizó un diseño cuasi-experimental de dos olas, con un grupo cuasi-experimental y un grupo cuasi-control, ambos conformados por estudiantes de enseñanza básica de establecimientos educacionales del norte de Chile. Para evaluar el impacto de estas intervenciones fueron utilizadas dos medidas de autoreporte, el KIDSCREEN-52 Index y el promedio de calificaciones anuales. En cuanto a la CVRS, los resultados revelaron diferencias basales significativas entre el grupo cuasi-experimental y cuasi-control, las cuales fueron reducidas después de la intervención, observándose mayores cambios en el grupo cuasi-experimental. Respecto al rendimiento, se observaron diferencias significativas entre el grupo cuasi-experimental y cuasi-control después de la intervención, registrándose calificaciones más altas en el grupo cuasi-experimental. Las intervenciones de autoafirmación han demostrado ser una estrategia útil, eficaz y práctica para mejorar diversos indicadores de calidad de vida relacionada con la salud y el rendimiento en contextos educativos, especialmente después de una crisis sanitaria.
... Such strategies can comprise value-confirmation or re-appraisal of the situation to regulate one's approach to the threatening event and thus one's emotional state [45,85]. Because self-affirmation may be one way to cope with existential threats [86], self-affirming materialistic values through increased consumption could help materialists to cope with adversity [12,34]. Another possible explanation for differences in materialism being more determinant of stockpiling among individuals from low childhood SES is that variation in materialism could be greater among this group. ...
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Previous research has shown that perceived existential threat experienced during or shortly after the first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, engendered anticipated scarcity and stockpiling behavior. However, the relationship between anticipated scarcity and stockpiling may not hold unambiguously for everyone. Across two studies and one preregistered replication (N = 644), we show that perceived threat of COVID-19 is associated with stockpiling tendencies by increasing the anticipation of product scarcity–a resource threat. The association between anticipated product scarcity and stockpiling depends, however, on childhood socio-economic status (SES) and materialism. For individuals with low childhood SES, the anticipation of product scarcity was only associated with stockpiling among those who valued materialism. Individuals with high childhood SES, by contrast, stockpiled in response to anticipated scarcity regardless of their level of materialism. Our findings qualify previous literature on the association between perceived threat of COVID-19, anticipated scarcity and stockpiling during the COVID-19 pandemic and help reconcile contradictory predictions about the role of childhood SES in individuals’ consumption behavior in response to adversity.
... However, evidence suggests that these effects may only hold in low-stakes environments or when information is deemed unimportant or irrelevant (Aspinwall, 1998;Isen, 2000). For example, many studies have shown that positive affect and optimistic beliefs increase the processing of and response to threatening health information (see Sherman et al., 2000). Other studies find that positive affect increases willingness to receive negative but useful feedback (Trope & Neter, 1994;Trope & Pomerantz, 1998). ...
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We conduct 2 incentivized random-assignment experiments to investigate whether overconfidence is impacted by (a) incidental mild positive affect, or (b) incidental mild negative affects—anger, fear, and sadness. We measure overconfidence using overestimation of past quiz-performance and overestimation of past quiz-performance compared to peers. The results of the first experiment indicate that the effect of positive affect on both measures of overconfidence is positive and significant for male subjects. Although mood-inducement is equally successful for female subjects, their overconfidence is unaffected by positive affect. These positive affect results are robust to various specification checks. In the second experiment, we find consistent evidence of neither anger, fear, nor sadness’s effect on overconfidence; the lack of a result is attributable either to a genuine lack of relationship between these affects and overconfidence or to confounded mood-inducements. The effect of positive affect on overconfidence may help explain the relationship between mood and speculative bubbles and between mood and trading volume. Further, our results have implications for the effect of happiness on overconfidence and the role of emotions in economic decision-making, in general. Finally, we examine the neural evidence supported by our data.
... Affirming the self "broadens" the threatened person's perspective about themself (i.e., that they are more than the stigmatized part of their identity). Selfaffirmation interventions, which can take the form of having people write about what they value in structured exercises, have been shown to increase openness and engagement with threatening information related to health (Harris & Napper, 2005;Sherman et al., 2000;see Epton et al., 2015;Sweeney & Moyer, 2015 for meta-analyses). To focus on the example of problematic drinking when people hear potentially threatening health information such as "you drink too much," one pathway by which they can mitigate the threat is by changing their behavior and ceasing their drinking. ...
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Annually, alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use are responsible for the 11.8 million deaths worldwide, exceeding the number of deaths from all cancers ( Ritchie & Roser, 2018 ). Motivational Interviewing (MI), a person-centered addiction counseling approach ( Miller & Rollnick, 2013 ), is designed for those with low motivation to change. MI is presumed to minimize client defensiveness by avoiding confrontation. Culturally adapting evidence-based treatments such as MI may reduce alcohol-related health disparities among Latinx adults. A completed randomized trial tested the relative efficacy of Culturally Adapted Motivational Interview (CAMI) compared to MI in Latinx drinkers. CAMI had beneficial alcohol use effects among persons who reported high discrimination and stigma ( Lee et al., 2019 ). Self-Affirmation Theory, which provides a mechanism where stigma effects can be buffered, was integrated into the CAMI. Augmenting affirmation in the CAMI is postulated to lower defensiveness and increase openness to information that pose a threat to self-image ( Sherman & Cohen, 2006 ). The purpose of this case example is to present the novel features of CAMI and to suggest how affirmation may have played in the CAMI’s beneficial effects for individuals with high discrimination. The case example illustrates how the CAMI addresses three conditions for self-affirmation associated with strongest effects on motivating behavior change ( Ferrer & Cohen, 2019 ): the presence of psychological threat, timing and availability of resources.
... Experiments show that when people were first given a chance to shore up their sense of self-integrity-typically by recalling their own socially desirable behaviors (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000;Reed & Aspinwall, 1998) or by asserting a closely held value (e.g., Steele, 1988)-they became more receptive to otherwise self-threatening information. Smokers (Crocker et al., 2008) and caffeine-users (Sherman et al., 2000) lent more credence to research on the dangers of those products, and privileged group members increased their acknowledgement of racism (Adams et al., 2006), anti-gay prejudice (Lehmiller et al., 2010), and class-based advantage (Phillips & Lowery, 2020). Self-affirmation can weaken the influence of identity-relevant beliefs on reactions to persuasive communications (Cohen et al., 2007), allowing them to be judged on their own merits rather than distorted through a self-protective lens. ...
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Sexual assault statistics are both widely disseminated and routinely challenged. Two studies investigated reactions to sexual assault research through the lens of ideologically motivated science denial. In particular, hostile sexism was expected to positively predict skepticism of sexual assault research. In Study 1, adult men in the United States ( N = 316) reported their hostile sexism, then read one of three research summaries and reported their skepticism of the findings. Although there was no difference in skepticism across conditions, hostile sexism was a stronger predictor of skepticism regarding sexual assault research than of skepticism regarding breast cancer or alcohol abuse research. In Study 2 ( N = 254), a standard self-affirmation manipulation failed to alter the hostile sexism-skepticism relation. Given that people deny science when it contradicts their ideology, it was posited that the research substantiating sexual assault had clashed with hostilely sexist views of women. Strategies beyond standard self-affirmation interventions, such as scientific literacy psychoeducation, may thus be needed to effectively communicate sexual assault-relevant science to hostile audiences.
... Self-affirmation has also been used to promote safe sex; self-affirmed sexually active participants who wrote about a vital value before viewing an HIV education video were more likely to perceive themselves at risk and therefore purchase condoms non-affirmed participants (Sherman, Nelson, & Steele, 2000). ...
... One explanation for the relationship between fan involvement and the ETA is that highly involved fans may be more likely to engage in selective attention and biased processing of information related to their team or sport [62]. This can lead to a confirmation bias, where fans selectively attend to and interpret information that supports their pre-existing beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them [63]. For example, a fan who is highly involved with a particular team may only pay attention to statistics or news stories that support their belief that their team will be likely to sell out, while ignoring or dismissing information that suggests otherwise [53]. ...
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Optimally deciding on the best deal for sport event tickets requires the ability to evaluate risk and make informed decisions in uncertain environments. This study examines how individual trait factors, such as experience, expertise, and involvement, influence consumers’ decision-making process when purchasing tickets online for sporting events. To examine and test the study hypotheses, 640 respondents from a Qualtrics survey panel were recruited from geographically confined subjects of New York City sports fans over a ten-day data collection period. The research subjects were surveyed to assess their perception of the expected likelihood of obtaining event tickets at a lower rate (ELR) and the expected likelihood that tickets would remain available (ETA) as the event day approached. MANOVA showed that there was a significant effect of the time period on the participants’ ETA and ELR risk assessments [Λ = 0.954, F (18, 1262) = 1.653, p < 0.05]. The ETA was highest ten days before the event and lowest the day before the event, with a similar pattern observed for the ELR. The mediation path analysis showed that fan involvement had a strong positive correlation with confidence (B = 0.496, p < 0.001). Confidence, in turn, was a significant predictor of the ELR (B = 5.729, p < 0.05) but not for the ETA (B = 1.516, p = 0.504). The positive mediation of confidence between fan involvement and the ELR indicates that consumers with higher fan involvement tend to have overconfidence in their ability to evaluate the uncertain purchase environment, which ultimately impacts their risk perception and decision-making. The study highlights the importance of considering both temporal and psychological factors when assessing the likelihood of ticket purchases and provides behavioral insights for sports marketers and ticket distributors.
... Self-affirmation allows individuals to expand their working self-concept via reminders of other self-attributes (Critcher & Dunning, 2014;Steele, 1988), social identities (Rydell, McConnell, & Beilock, 2009), and values (Miyake et al., 2010) that are important to the self. Affirming the self reduces defensiveness, increases people's receptiveness to threatening information (Sherman & Cohen, 2006;Sherman, Nelson, & Steele, 2000), and activates positive, other-directed feelings, such as love and connection, which prompts individuals to transcend the self and self-esteem concerns (Crocker, Niiya, & Mischkowski, 2008). ...
Article
Social psychologists have long been interested in studying the effects of threat on physiology, affect, cognition, and behavior. However, researchers have traditionally examined threat at the level of individuals, relationships, or groups, rather than studying commonalities that exist across these levels. In this chapter, we propose that social evaluative threat – the real, imagined, or potential experience of being negatively evaluated – can occur at the level of the individual self, as a relational partner, or as a group member. Individual, relational, and collective selves are not always distinct entities, but are flexible and can overlap with one another. Across these levels, individuals differ in the degree to which they perceive and respond to social evaluative threat, depending on their psychological distance from the threat and expectations and motivation to detect threat. When people perceive a threat to any of these levels, they respond by engaging in behaviors reflecting approach or avoidance motivation. Overall, our model encourages researchers to assess key moderators of threat, examine threats at different levels of the self, and consider how experiences of threat at one level may impact other levels. By highlighting the flexibility of the self, researchers can test interventions that change threat cues in the environment, attenuate perceptions of threat, or help people cope with threat.
... Specifically, studies on academic performance have demonstrated that self-affirmation is associated with better executive function [7], greater persistence in painful moments [8], and greater receptivity to one's performance errors [9]. Studies on health behavior change show that self-affirmation helps people accept and be more openminded about self-relevant threatening information [10,11]. ...
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Objectives: Self-affirmation may be a promising treatment strategy for improving clinical outcomes. This study examined the association between self-affirmation and self-reported health status among people with chronic pain. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 768 treatment seeking people (female 67.2%, mean age=50.4 years with SD of 17.1, White/Caucasian 59.9%) completed surveys using a learning healthcare system. Measures included spontaneous self-affirmation (SSA) items, PROMIS® outcome measures, and Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS). Multiple regressions were conducted to examine if strength-based SSA, value-based SSA, and their interaction would predict perceived health status and pain coping strategy. Sensitivity analysis was done by performing additional regressions with covariates (age, sex, race/ethnicity, and education). Lastly, exploratory analysis examined if average SSA scores would have a linear relationship with perceived health status. Results: The strength x value-based SSA interaction significantly predicted the PROMIS-depression, anxiety, and social isolation T-scores (ps≤0.007), but not anger T-scores (p=0.067). Specifically, greater tendency to use both SSA styles predicted less symptoms of depression, anxiety and social isolation. This interaction remained significant when controlling for the covariates. The two SSA styles and their interaction did not significantly predict pain interference, sleep disturbance, fatigue, average pain rating and PCS scores (ps≥0.054). Exploratory analysis revealed SSA average scores did not have a significant linear relationship with perceived health status. Conclusions: The current study showed self-affirmation as being associated with better psychosocial health, but not associated with physical health and pain catastrophizing among patients with chronic pain. Our findings suggested the potential benefit of incorporating strength- and value-based affirmations in pain intervention approaches.
... From the perspective of motivational accounts, an important aspect of self-affirmation is that it elicits positive self-feelings, whereas self-threat elicits negative self-feelings (see Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Moreover, positive self-feelings should serve as a buffer against potential threats, which should increase people's openness to potentially threating information (e.g., Sherman et al., 2000). Conversely, negative selffeelings should make people especially sensitive to potential threats, which should reduce their openness to potentially threatening information (e.g., Liberman & Chaiken, 1992). ...
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Misinformation represents one of the greatest challenges for the functioning of societies in the information age. Drawing on a signal-detection framework, the current research investigated two distinct aspects of misinformation susceptibility: truth sensitivity, conceptualized as accurate discrimination between true and false information, and partisan bias, conceptualized as lower acceptance threshold for ideology-congruent information compared to ideology-incongruent information. Four preregistered experiments (N = 2,423) examined (1) truth sensitivity and partisan bias in veracity judgments and decisions to share information and (2) determinants and correlates of truth sensitivity and partisan bias in responses to misinformation. Although participants were able to distinguish between true and false information to a considerable extent, sharing decisions were largely unaffected by actual information veracity. A strong partisan bias emerged for both veracity judgments and sharing decisions, with partisan bias being unrelated to the overall degree of truth sensitivity. While truth sensitivity increased as a function of cognitive reflection during encoding, partisan bias increased as a function of subjective confidence. Truth sensitivity and partisan bias were both associated with misinformation susceptibility, but partisan bias was a stronger and more reliable predictor of misinformation susceptibility than truth sensitivity. Implications and open questions for future research are discussed.
... Here are some examples that show this common root: they establish a categorical separation between positive thoughts and emotions and negative ones, arguing that the latter, a source of anxiety, failure, and depression, are to be located, recognized and changed to more positive affirmations, since "pessimism is maladaptive for most efforts, in such a way that pessimists fail in most areas they set out to accomplish (Seligman, 2002, pp. 178); they promote practices such as the exercise of gratitude and forgiveness as a way to increase the positive emotions and happiness of the individual (Bono, Emmons and McCullough, 2004); they advocate the cultivation of hope as a strategy to facilitate personal change and to help to clarify, maintain and pursue the desired goals (López et al, 2004); they emphasize the clarification of one's own desires and goals, studying their advantages and disadvantages, as well as the beneficial effect of affirmations (Sherman, Nelson and Steele, 2000); and they advise readers to avoid over-analysis ("over-thinking") as a pernicious activity and distraction that prevents the subject from "allowing themselves to be led" ("flow") by interests and desires that would otherwise be deployed naturally and spontaneously, preventing them from enjoying the small things that bring happiness and increasing positive affect toward the self (Lyubomisrsky, 2007). Many positive psychologists argue that their movement filters and improves all these claims and practices scientifically and that, although they may be popular, "they work." ...
... admissions outcomes (Logel et al., 2012), but they can also adversely affect academic performance and aspiration (Spencer et al., 2016), increase stress, compromise well-being, and provoke self-destructive behavior (Sherman et al., 2000). Stereotype threat activates a cascade of negative automatic thoughts (Steele & Aronson, 1995), underestimation of one's own abilities (Walton & Spencer, 2009), and subsequent underperformance (Walton & Spencer, 2009)especially in those who strongly identify with a stigmatized or stereotyped group (Spencer et al., 2016). ...
Article
The stories we tell can shape our lives and our experiences. Unfortunately, many African American adolescents are often subjected to stereotypes and one-sided deficit narratives that can become self-fulfilling prophecies undermining their achievement, aspirations, and well-being. However, the college admission process offers an intervention opportunity to help these students tell a different story—their story. In this paper, the author presents an analysis of the threats and opportunities inherent in the college-admission process and a literature review on topics aligned to three pillars—beliefs, belonging, and becoming. The paper concludes with the application plan for an intervention that leverages the college admission essay and essay-writing process to reframe beliefs and shape positive personal narratives. Inspired by research from narrative psychology, social psychology, and positive psychology, OurStory challenges dominant deficit narratives and aims to improve academic outcomes, college matriculation rates, and adolescent flourishing and well-being.
... A large body of empirical work has demonstrated that SA lowers defensiveness in connection with a diverse range of threatening information, which in turn reduces bias in assimilating such information (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000;Cohen et al., 2005;Correll et al., 2004). These effects have been demonstrated in the domains of threatening health information (e.g., Harris & Napper, 2005;Reed & Aspinwall, 1998;Sherman et al., 2000), evaluative stress (e.g., Creswell et al., 2005;Taylor et al., 2003), and cognitive dissonance (e.g., Blanton et al., 2001;Matz & Wood, 2005). ...
Article
The dispositional trait of intellectual humility (IH) refers to the degree to which people recognize their beliefs might be fallible. For the most part, it has been conceptualized as a “trait” variable that reflects a stable individual difference, however, in the current study, we examined whether IH also has “state”-like characteristics by testing whether it is susceptible to modification via a self-affirmation (SA) induction, which in previous research has been shown to reduce defensiveness in the face of information that threatens the self. To test this hypothesis, we first threatened participants by having them read a counter-attitudinal essay that contradicted their belief in God and then allowed half of the participants to affirm the self by writing about an important value that they hold. Following this SA induction, all participants completed a brief IH measure. Consistent with our hypothesis, statistical analyses revealed that participants in the SA condition reported significantly higher IH than participants in the control (no affirmation) condition. These findings suggest that in addition to having features associated with relatively fixed personality traits, IH is also amenable to change on the basis of a simple situational manipulation under conditions of self-threat.
... Steele (1988) argues that making values salient is sufficient to self-affirm individuals. Value scales, questionnaires (Napper et al., 2009;Sherman et al., 2000), and value essays (Armitage & Rowe, 2011;Crocker et al., 2008) are all valid approaches to manipulating self-affirmation. More recently, Zhu and Yzer (2019) developed the brief scale affirmation task (B-SAT), in which the researchers were successful at manipulating self-affirmation with an 11item questionnaire. ...
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The present research sought to examine the effects of self-affirmation on women’s confrontation approaches following exposure to sexism. However, before examining the effects of self-affirmation, we needed a way to measure confrontation approaches. In Study 1, participants read either prototypical HATE or CARE confrontations and assessed the response. Researchers then conducted an exploratory factor analysis to create a novel scale that can assess approaches to confrontation. Study 1 also established the reliability of the HATE and CARE subscales (α = .956 and α = .929, respectively). Study 2 sought to establish the construct validity of the new measure. Study 2 implemented the same procedure as Study 1 and a confirmatory factor analysis revealed that while there is room to improve the new measure, the model fit is not necessarily bad. Finally, Study 3 explored the effects of self-affirmation on women’s confrontation approaches after exposure to sexism. After manipulating self-affirmation, women participated in an imagined scenario where they responded to a male colleague making sexist comments. We hypothesized that (1) self-affirmed women would directly confront the sexism less than non-affirmed women, (2) self-affirmed women would have lower HATE scores than non-affirmed women, (3) self-affirmed women would have higher CARE scores than non- affirmed women, (4) self-affirmed women would have lower perceived responsibly to confront compared to non-affirmed women, and (5) self-affirmed women would have lower negative state affect than non-affirmed women. Results of the statistical analyses supported Hypothesis 1. Implications for the findings of the three studies are discussed.
... racial minorities) and, thus, improves their academic performance (Wu et al., 2021), reduces academic stress (Hadden et al., 2020) and increases trust (Binning et al., 2019) and belongingness to schools (Layous et al., 2017). In health domains, self-affirmation has been found to reduce resistance to health-risk information among individuals with high health risk and increase their self-efficacy in adopting healthful habits (Armitage et al., 2008;Fielden et al., 2016;Sherman et al., 2000). ...
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Purpose Previous research has demonstrated that affirming an individual’s self-worth in intrinsic, stable aspects (e.g. personal attributes) enhances their pro-relationship tendencies, as compared to affirming extrinsic aspects of the individual (e.g. performance). This is especially so among people in certain dissatisfying relationships (e.g. romantic relationships). Extending this finding to organizational contexts, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of affirmation type (intrinsic vs extrinsic affirmations) on responses to workplace offenses among employees with high versus low job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach Studies 1 ( N = 224) and 2 ( N = 358) examined the effects of intrinsic versus extrinsic affirmations on responses to hypothetical and real workplace offenses. Furthermore, to compare the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic affirmations to the baseline level, Study 3 ( N = 441) added a control condition and examined the effects of affirmation type (intrinsic vs extrinsic vs control) on responses to workplace offenses. Findings For employees with low (but not high) job satisfaction, (1) intrinsic (vs extrinsic) affirmations promoted more prosocial responses (forgiveness and reconciliation) to workplace offenses; (2) although not as effective as intrinsic affirmations, extrinsic affirmations (vs baseline) also triggered prosocial intentions toward workplace offenses. Originality/value First, the study enriches the literature on workplace offenses by focusing on an individual-level factor – self-worth – that can be intervened (e.g. affirming one’s self-worth) by organizations and managers so as to promote prosocial responses to workplace offenses. Second, the study expands the scope of the self-affirmation theory in organizational contexts by examining the effectiveness of intrinsic and extrinsic affirmations in coping with workplace offenses. Third, practically speaking, the study provides a brief intervention (the writing task of describing an intrinsic or extrinsic affirmation experience) that can boost pro-relationships in the workplace.
Article
Background Self-affirmation theory (SAT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) embody competing approaches to leveraging personal values to motivate behavior change but are rarely compared in the domain of health behavior. This study compares these theory-driven values-based interventions for promoting medication adherence. Purpose To compare affective and behavioral responses to competing values-based medication adherence interventions. Methods In this three-armed randomized trial, participants with cancer (n = 95) or diabetes (n = 97) recruited online using Prolific and prescribed daily oral medication for that disease completed a one-session online writing intervention leveraging (1) a domain incongruent (DI) value, where the value was not connected to medication adherence; (2) a domain congruent (DC) value, where the value was connected to adherence; or (3) a control condition, focused on medication adherence procedures. Results There were no main effects of conditions on reported medication adherence at the 1-month follow-up. During the intervention, positive affect was higher in the values conditions than control (p < .001), and trended higher in DI versus DC (p = .054). Negative affect did not vary between the values and control groups (p = .093) but was lower in DI versus DC (p = .006). Improvements in positive affect over the course of the intervention were associated with increased adherence behavior for individuals who started with low levels of positive affect (p = .003). Disease type did not moderate findings. Conclusions Consistent with SAT, focusing on DI values led to more positive and less negative affect than connecting values directly to behavior in a threatening domain such as chronic illness. For some participants, increases in positive affect predicted greater adherence.
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Both in their quantity and their quality, informal political conversations can provide an important bellwether for democratic health. However, not everyone is willing to participate in political conversations in all settings, and systematic imbalances in who chooses not to share political attitudes can distort perceptions of public opinion. Using data from three original surveys, including both observational and experimental analysis, we examine people’s decisions to initiate political discussions using a psychological framework of self-threat and self-affirmation. We find that political conversations pose a higher level of self-threat when disagreement is probable and the relationship with the potential discussion partner is weaker. High levels of self-threat, measured via self-reported anxiety, are associated with a lower willingness to initiate a political conversation. However, self-threat can be counteracted. While it does not reduce the anxiety associated with a threatening situation, self-affirmation increases people’s willingness to initiate a political conversation in higher threat circumstances. This suggests that efforts to find common ground or boost confidence by reflecting on non-political values could increase the pool of people willing to bring up and share their political views.
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Organizational justice scholars have examined the consequences and causes of employees’ fairness perceptions. Given the reliability of what is known about how, when, and why fairness perceptions matter, we can and should contribute to addressing the pressing problems of our times, regardless of whether they primarily reside within organizations (e.g., diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)) or outside of organizations (e.g., climate change, political extremism). Our focus aligns with more general calls for responsible management research (Tsui, 2022). Accordingly, we illustrate the implications of organizational justice scholarship for addressing three issues: DEI, climate change, and political extremism. We also consider some of the barriers associated with translating organizational justice theory and research to practice, offer some recommendations on how to overcome those barriers, and delineate some of the unintended consequences of our best efforts. Finally, we describe ways in which organizational justice scholars can make our knowledge more accessible in public domains.
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The creative process has the potential to increase wellbeing and foster human flourishing (Dolan and Metcalfe, 2012; Forgeard and Eichner, 2014; O’Brien and Murray, 2015; Conner et al., 2018; Kaufman, 2018), yet has received little attention in the humanistic management literature. In this paper, we present three experiments showing that idea originators experience greater relationship conflict with counterparts who have committed perceived “idea theft”, i.e., proposed identical or related ideas. We test a model that identifies a mechanism—self-threat—that mediates the relationship between idea theft and relationship conflict and identifies an intervention to ameliorate that self-threat via self-affirmation. Study 1 demonstrates the idea originator’s attribution of malign attributions to, and negative moral emotions toward, the counterpart. Study 2 demonstrates that idea originators ostracize both those who propose identical ideas and those who propose merely related ideas. In Study 3, evidence for self-threat as the mechanism underlying the negative relational consequences is provided via both a direct test of mediation as well as via moderation by self-affirmation. Our research contributes to the nascent idea theft literature and suggests a way to reduce its negative consequences.
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Researchers across theoretical traditions have long recognized the need for people to monitor and modulate certain aspects of their subjective experiences (such as their thoughts and feelings) in response to situational challenges that interfere with the attainment of important goals. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to understanding the beliefs and mechanisms necessary to regulate motivational states—i.e., metamotivation, even though motivational states are often integral to people's subjective experiences of events. As particular types of motivational states are more adaptive in some contexts than in others, flexibly instantiating the right motivational state at the right time may be key to achieving one's goals. The current paper reviews the principles of the metamotivational approach to studying motivation regulation and briefly reviews supporting research. In addition, we highlight metamotivation research conducted in the context of self‐affirmation theory to demonstrate the generative potential of this approach for researching phenomena that have traditionally been treated as separate from self‐regulation. We conclude by discussing some of the novel questions that the metamotivational approach has prompted, both in and outside of the self‐regulatory domain.
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School and university can be stressful contexts that can become an important source of identity threats when social prejudices or stereotypes come into play. Self-affirmation interventions are key strategies for mitigating the negative consequences of identity threat. This meta-analysis aims to provide an overview of the effectiveness of self-affirmation interventions in educational settings. A peer-reviewed article search was conducted in January 2023. A total of 144 experimental studies that tested the effect of self-affirmation interventions in educational contexts among high school and university students from different social and cultural backgrounds were considered. The average effect of self-affirmation interventions was of low magnitude (dIG+ = 0.41, z = 16.01, p < 0.00), with a 95% confidence interval whose values tended to lie between 0.36 and 0.45 (SE = 0.0253). In addition, moderators such as identity threat, participants’ age, and intervention procedure were found. Through a meta-analysis of the impact of self-affirmation interventions in educational contexts, this study suggests that interventions are effective, resulting in a small mean effect size. Thus, self-affirmation interventions can be considered useful, brief, and inexpensive strategies to improve general well-being and performance in educational settings.
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Teacher leadership has recently gained significant attention in the literature since there is enough evidence that it leads to effective student outcomes. Therefore, many scholars study the antecedents of teacher leadership. This study investigates the impact of self-affirmation on teacher leadership beliefs through an experimental design. Self-affirmation, a well-established construct in psychological science, refers to participants’ affirming their self-transcendent (e.g., empathy, justice, honesty) or self-enhancement (e.g., power, status, wealth) values through a writing exercise. In the experiment (n=221), participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a self-transcendent value-affirmation group (STVA), a self-enhancement value-affirmation group (SEVA), or a control group. Participants in three groups wrote about their self-transcendent values, self-enhancement values or their meals and completed teacher leadership belief scale. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) demonstrated that the STVA group had significantly higher scores on teacher leadership belief scales compared to the SEVA and the control group. This finding suggests that affirming self-transcendent values can lead teachers to adopt leadership beliefs, which in turn is likely to affect their leadership behaviours. School leaders can incorporate self-affirmation exercises into professional development programmes to facilitate teacher leadership.
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Terror management research has found that mortality salience increases self-esteem preservation, which tends to produce counter-persuasive effects in the health context. The present study examines the persuasive potentials of an alternative mortality prime, death reflection, in a between-subjects online experiment with current smokers (N = 92). We tested the effects of two death primes on their posttraumatic growth, identification with a story character, and quitting intentions after exposure to an anti-smoking PSA. The results showed that only death reflection significantly affected quitting intentions through two serial mediators. First, death reflection promoted a greater sense of posttraumatic growth than the control condition, whereas mortality salience did not. Second, the increased sense of growth enhanced identification with a testimonial character in the anti-smoking PSA, which, in turn, lowered quitting intentions. Implications for health communication are discussed.
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In the framework of prevention of social media addiction, persuasive messages can be used to stimulate people to engage in social media self-control behaviours. However, the effects of these messages may be weakened by defensive reactions. In the Working Memory account of Persuasion, these defensive self-regulatory actions in the Working Memory (WM) are activated to lower a given threat. Because the WM has limited capacity, and these defensive processes take WM capacity, they can be inhibited by inducing eye movements (EMi). Adults (N = 117) from the general population listened in an online experiment to an auditory message on the negative consequences of social media use (SMU). Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the EMi condition; they were asked to keep watching a moving red square on their screen during the exposure to the auditory message. SMU self-control behaviour was the outcome measure, assessed by self-report 2 weeks later. The effects of EMi on SMU self-control behaviour were moderated by individual differences, indicating defensive self-regulatory actions: EMi significantly increased behaviour in participants who scored low on Cognitive Self-affirmation Inclination, high on SMU-control-failure, and, unexpectedly, low in SMU. This study detected defensive reactions towards persuasive information concerning SMU, using the EMi research paradigm.
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The beneficial effect of self-affirmation on the reduction of people’s defensive responses and the increase in message acceptance has been widely demonstrated in different health-related topics. However, little is known about the specific conditions in which self-affirmation strategies might be more effective. Our objective is to explore the interplay of self-affirmation and self-efficacy in the context of alcohol consumption. Recruited participants were randomly assigned to either a self-affirmation group or a no-treatment group and exposed to a video describing several consequences of alcohol consumption. Following the message exposure, participant’s drinking refusal self-efficacy was measured together with their perceived risk of daily alcohol intake. In line with our predictions, self-affirmed individuals who reported higher drinking refusal self-efficacy perceived daily alcohol consumption as a significantly higher risk than those who were assigned to the no-treatment condition. In contrast, for individuals with low drinking refusal self-efficacy, there was no significant difference in the perceived risk between the self-affirmed and the non-affirmed. We predicted and showed that self-affirmation influences the risk perception of daily drinking only for the people who reported higher drinking refusal self-efficacy. This indicates that self-efficacy could be an important factor that moderates the effect of self-affirmation in alcohol consumption domain.
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People often close themselves off to novel ideas without giving them adequate consideration. By doing so, they possibly miss out on important advantages these ideas may bring. One strategy that appears to effectively reduce such resistance involves self‐affirming techniques, which aim to bolster one's self‐concept by focusing on values of the self which are unrelated to the persuasion topic. The current study focuses on a new aspect that may be essential to increase its effectiveness, so‐called “processing‐related self‐affirmations” which are related to how a person processes a message. We investigated the effect of processing‐related self‐affirmations on resistance to persuasion. Nonvegetarian participants were asked to apply a processing‐related self‐affirmation, an unrelated self‐affirmation, or no self‐affirmation before reading a scientific report about the merits of vegetarianism. Results showed participants were, depending on the weekly amount of meat consumed, more favorable toward the report after being affirmed on an unrelated value compared with participants who were not self‐affirmed, but no similar effect was found for processing‐related self‐affirmations. We cautiously show that relatedness and compatibility with the persuasion domain may not be the only factors influencing this effect, and include relatedness of self‐affirmations to the processing of the persuasive message as a possible new factor.
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Members of historically advantaged groups are often unwilling to support actions or policies aimed at reducing inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, even if they generally support the principle of equality. Based on past research, we suggest a self-affirmation intervention (an intervention in which people reflect on a positive trait or value in order to affirm their positive self-image) may be effective for increasing the willingness of advantaged group members to address inequality. Importantly, while self-affirmation has in the past only operationalized as a written exercise, in this project we adapt it into video messages for use in public campaigns. In Study 1, we experimentally tested an initial video adaptation of self-affirmation and found that it is effective in increasing the willingness of advantaged group members to address inequality in the context of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. Based on this study, NGOs developed a real campaign video and used it in their public campaign, and we tested this applied intervention (in Study 2) and found it to be effective compared to a control condition that only presented information about inequality. Together, these studies represent the first implementation of self-affirmation in real world campaigns and indicate that it can be effective way to increase support for action to address inequality.
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Self-affirmation—reflecting on a source of global self-integrity outside of the threatened domain—can mitigate self-threat in education, health, relationships, and more. Whether people recognize these benefits is unknown. Inspired by the metamotivational approach, we examined people’s beliefs about the benefits of self-affirmation and whether individual differences in these beliefs predict how people cope with self-threat. The current research revealed that people recognize that self-affirmation is selectively helpful for self-threat situations compared with other negative situations. However, people on average did not distinguish between self-affirmation and alternative strategies for coping with self-threat. Importantly, individual differences in these beliefs predicted coping decisions: Those who recognized the benefits of self-affirmation were more likely to choose to self-affirm rather than engage in an alternative strategy following an experience of self-threat. We discuss implications for self-affirmation theory and developing interventions to promote adaptive responses to self-threat.
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Writing-based psychological interventions have been widely implemented to produce adaptive change, e.g., through self-affirmation (reminding people of their most important values). To maintain the long-term effects of these interventions, we developed a form of intervention boosters—using user-customized computer passwords to convey the therapeutic messages. We examined whether computer passwords could enhance the effect of a self-affirmation intervention on the psychological well-being of sexual minority undergraduate students as they begin university. Participants were randomly assigned to either complete a self-affirmation writing exercise and create a self-affirming computer password to use for 6 weeks or complete a control writing exercise and create a control computer password. We found that frequency of password usage moderated the intervention effect, such that frequent use of self-affirming passwords buffered decreases in psychological well-being over the study period. These findings suggest that passwords can serve as a low-cost, low-burden, and timely booster for writing-based psychological interventions.
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Background To assess Hong Kong medical students’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs on cannabis and its future legal reform. Methods A cross-sectional anonymous online survey were sent from 1st December 2018 to 31st August 2020 to all medical students from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Results 187 students (13.6%) responded the survey. Overall, students perceived cannabis possessed significant physical and mental health risks, but they were more neutral to its physical and mental benefits. They also supported legalizing cannabis more so for medical use than recreational use. Females perceived higher risks than males. Those who used cannabis before were more acceptable to recommend cannabis as medical treatments, perceived cannabis use with greater benefits and less risks, and were more likely to support legal reform for cannabis in Hong Kong than their counterparts. Students were also more likely to recommend medical cannabis than non-licensed cannabis to patients if they were legally available. Conclusion Medical students in Hong Kong supported legalization of cannabis for medical use despite perceiving significant risks from cannabis use. Future research should investigate public acceptance on medical cannabis in Hong Kong and other Asian countries.
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Two experiments investigated how the dissonance that follows a hypocritical behavior is reduced when 2 alternatives are available: a direct strategy (changing behavior to make it less hypocritical) or an indirect strategy (the affirmation of an unrelated positive aspect of the self). In Experiment 1, after dissonance was aroused by hypocrisy, significantly more participants chose to reduce dissonance directly, despite the clear availability of a self-affirmation strategy. In Experiment 2, participants again chose direct resolution of their hypocritical discrepancy, even when the opportunity to affirm the self held more importance for their global self-worth. The discussion focuses on the mechanisms that influence how people select among readily available strategies for dissonance reduction.
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The tendency to believe that one's own risk is less than that of others may reduce interest in health-protective behaviors. This article describes 4 attempts to reduce such optimistic biases. In Study 1, New Jersey residents (N = 222) were provided with lists of risk factors for several health problems. This manipulation was strengthened in Study 2 by presenting risk factors in such a way that participants (164 undergraduates) might see their own standing as inferior to that of others. In Study 3, risk factors were presented one at a time, and participants (190 undergraduates) incorporated them into a mental image of a high-risk individual. Finally, 374 undergraduates in Study 4 generated lists of personal attributes that they believed increased their risk. Optimistic biases were found in each study, but none of the manipulations reduced these biases consistently. In contrast, conditions using opposite manipulations often exacerbated the biases.
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It was predicted that high self-esteem Ss (HSEs) would rationalize an esteem-threatening decision less than low self-esteem Ss (LSEs), because HSEs presumably had more favorable self-concepts with which to affirm, and thus repair, their overall sense of self-integrity. This prediction was supported in 2 experiments within the “free-choice” dissonance paradigm—one that manipulated self-esteem through personality feedback and the other that varied it through selection of HSEs and LSEs, but only when Ss were made to focus on their self-concepts. A 3rd experiment countered an alternative explanation of the results in terms of mood effects that may have accompanied the experimental manipulations. The results were discussed in terms of the following: (a) their support for a resources theory of individual differences in resilience to self-image threats—an extension of self-affirmation theory, (b) their implications for self-esteem functioning, and (c) their implications for the continuing debate over self-enhancement versus self-consistency motivation.
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Publisher Summary This chapter deals with terror management theory that attempts to contribute to the understanding of social behavior by focusing on the essential being and circumstance of the human animal. The theory posits that all human motives are ultimately derived from a biologically based instinct for self-preservation. Relative equanimity in the face of these existential realities is possible through the creation and maintenance of culture, which serves to minimize the terror by providing a shared symbolic context that imbues the universe with order, meaning, stability, and permanence. The theory provides a theoretical link between superficially unrelated substantive areas, and focuses on one particular motive that makes it distinctly human and, unfortunately, distinctly destructive. Theories serve a variety of equally important functions, all of which are oriented towards improving the ability to think about and understand the subject matter of discipline. The chapter discusses the dual-component cultural anxiety buffer: worldview and self-esteem, the development and functioning of the cultural anxiety buffer for the individual, and a terror management analysis of social behavior in great detail.
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This chapter outlines the two basic routes to persuasion. One route is based on the thoughtful consideration of arguments central to the issue, whereas the other is based on the affective associations or simple inferences tied to peripheral cues in the persuasion context. This chapter discusses a wide variety of variables that proved instrumental in affecting the elaboration likelihood, and thus the route to persuasion. One of the basic postulates of the Elaboration Likelihood Model—that variables may affect persuasion by increasing or decreasing scrutiny of message arguments—has been highly useful in accounting for the effects of a seemingly diverse list of variables. The reviewers of the attitude change literature have been disappointed with the many conflicting effects observed, even for ostensibly simple variables. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) attempts to place these many conflicting results and theories under one conceptual umbrella by specifying the major processes underlying persuasion and indicating the way many of the traditionally studied variables and theories relate to these basic processes. The ELM may prove useful in providing a guiding set of postulates from which to interpret previous work and in suggesting new hypotheses to be explored in future research. Copyright © 1986 Academic Press Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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An experiment tested whether a positive experience (the endorsement and recall of one's past acts of kindness) would reduce biased processing of self-relevant health-risk information. Women college students (N = 66) who reported high or low levels of daily caffeine use were exposed to both risk-confirming and risk-disconfirming information about the link between caffeine consumption and fibrocystic breast disease (FBD). Participants were randomly assigned to complete an affirmation of their kindness via questionnaire or to a no-affirmation condition. Results indicated that the affirmation manipulation made frequent caffeine drinkers more open, less biased processors of risk-related information. Relative to frequent caffeine drinkers who did not affirm their kindness, frequent caffeine drinkers in the affirmation condition oriented more quickly to the risk-confirming information, rated the risk-confirming information as more convincing than the risk-disconfirming information, and recalled less risk-disconfirming information at a 1-week follow-up. They also reported greater perceived personal control over reducing their level of caffeine consumption. Although frequent caffeine drinkers in the affirmation condition initially reported lower intentions to reduce their caffeine consumption, there was no evidence that they were less likely to decrease their caffeine consumption at the follow-up. The possibility that positive beliefs and experiences function as self-regulatory resources among people confronting threats to health and well-being is discussed.
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This experiment applied a new twist on cognitive dissonance theory to the problem of AIDS prevention among sexually active young adults. Dissonance was created after a proattitudinal advocacy by inducing hypocrisy-having subjects publicly advocate the importance of safe sex and then systematically making the subjects mindful of their own past failures to use condoms. It was predicted that the induction of hypocrisy would motivate subjects to reduce dissonance by purchasing condoms at the completion of the experiment. The results showed that more subjects in the hypocrisy condition bought condoms and also bought more condoms, on average, than subjects in the control conditions. The implications of the hypocrisy procedure for AIDS prevention programs and for current views of dissonance theory are discussed.
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Reviews scientific and professional trends in the field of health psychology. I discuss recent research on health promotion, psychological factors in the development of illness, cognitive representations of health and illness, stress and coping, social support, interventions to promote coping, and trends that will affect progress in the field, such as the need for cost containment and the aging of the population.
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Conducted 2 experiments to examine whether the tendency to make more extreme attributions following control deprivation, observed by T. S. Pittman and N. L. Pittman (see record 1981-25822-001), stemmed from a motive to regain actual environmental control or to affirm an image of oneself as able to control (important outcomes). Study 1 varied control deprivation by exposing 78 undergraduates to either high-, low-, or no-helplessness training prior to measuring attributions. A 4th condition exposed Ss to low-helplessness training but allowed them to affirm a valued self-image (by completing a self-relevant value scale) just prior to the attribution measure. Replicating the findings of Pittman and Pittman, Ss made more extreme attributions and had worse moods in the high- and low-helplessness conditions than in the no-helplessness condition, but in the 4th condition the self-affirming value scale eliminated the effect of low-helplessness training on both attributions and mood. Study 2, using 32 undergraduates, showed that this effect occurred only when the value scale was central to Ss' self-concept. It is concluded that the motive for attributional analysis following control deprivation in this paradigm was to protect a positive self-image rather than to regain environmental control and that this motive can stimulate attributional analysis that is not related to the self or the provoking control threat and, thus, is not self-serving. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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use models, methods, and findings from the field of behavioral decision research to analyze risk perceptions and decisions that affect the risk of HIV transmission / behavioral decision research is an interdisciplinary subfield that integrates conceptions of rational decision making—from economics and statistics—with cognitive views of behavior developed in psychology / consider 3 potential contributions of decision theory to the study of AIDS-related cognitions and behavior / normative decision theory provides a set of concepts for thinking about and analyzing decisions that affect the risk of acquiring or spreading HIV / behavioral decision research has revealed a variety of systematic biases in risk perceptions . . . and decision making processes / behavioral decision research provides a set of tools for measuring perceived risk introduces the basic concepts of decision theory and shows how they can be applied to issues involving risks of HIV infection / presents empirical data on 3 types of decision biases in thinking about HIV risks / discusses issues surrounding the assessment of perceived risks of HIV infection (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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People construct idiosyncratic, self-serving models of excellence or success in social domains, in part, to bolster self-esteem. In 3 studies, participants tended to articulate self-serving theories of success under experimental conditions in which pressures to maintain self-esteem were present, but not under conditions in which such pressures were absent. Participants assigned to role-play being a therapist were more self-serving in their assessments of the characteristics needed to be a "successful therapist" than were participants assigned to observe the role play (Study 1). Participants failing at an intellectual task articulated self-serving theories about the attributes crucial to success in marriage (Study 2) and evaluated targets similar to themselves more favorably than they did dissimilar targets (Study 3), tendencies not observed for participants succeeding at the task. Discussion centers on issues for future research suggested by these findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Two experiments with 96 undergraduates tested the hypothesis that high issue involvement enhances thinking about the content of a persuasive communication. Exp I varied involvement and the direction of a message (pro- or counterattitudinal). Increasing involvement enhanced persuasion for the proattitudinal but reduced persuasion for the counterattitudinal advocacy. Exp II again varied involvement, but both messages took a counterattitudinal position. One message employed compelling arguments and elicited primarily favorable thoughts, whereas the other employed weak arguments and elicited primarily counterarguments. Increasing involvement enhanced persuasion for the strong message but reduced persuasion for the weak one. Together the experiments provide support for the view that high involvement with an issue enhances message processing and therefore can result in either increased or decreased acceptance. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The authors argue that self-image maintenance processes play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. Three studies demonstrated that when individuals evaluated a member of a stereotyped group, they were less likely to evaluate that person negatively if their self-images had been bolstered through a self-affirmation procedure, and they were more likely to evaluate that person stereotypically if their self-images had been threatened by negative feedback. Moreover, among those individuals whose self-image had been threatened, derogating a stereotyped target mediated an increase in their self-esteem. The authors suggest that stereotyping and prejudice may be a common means to maintain one's self-image, and they discuss the role of self-image-maintenance processes in the context of motivational, sociocultural, and cognitive approaches to stereotyping and prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Three experiments show that information consistent with a preferred conclusion is examined less critically than information inconsistent with a preferred conclusion, and consequently, less information is required to reach the former than the latter. In Study 1, Ss judged which of 2 students was most intelligent, believing they would work closely with the one they chose. Ss required less information to decide that a dislikable student was less intelligent than that he was more intelligent. In Studies 2 and 3, Ss given an unfavorable medical test result took longer to decide their test result was complete, were more likely to retest the validity of their result, cited more life irregularities that might have affected test accuracy, and rated test accuracy as lower than did Ss receiving more favorable diagnoses. Results suggest that a core component of self-serving bias is the differential quantity of cognitive processing given to preference-consistent and preference-inconsistent information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Conducted 2 studies to assess the proposition that self-esteem (SE) serves an anxiety-buffering function. In Study 1, it was hypothesized that raising SE would reduce the need to deny vulnerability (VL) to early death. In support of this hypothesis, positive personality feedback eliminated 97 university students' tendency to bias emotionality reports to deny VL to a short life expectancy, except when mortality had been made salient to the Ss. Study 2, in which 47 university students participated, conceptually replicated this effect by demonstrating that whereas Ss low in trait SE biased emotionality reports to deny VL to a short life expectancy, Ss high in trait SE did not exhibit such a bias. Thus, converging evidence that SE reduces VL-denying defensive distortions was obtained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Tested the hypothesis that an experience that simply affirms a valued aspect of the self can eliminate dissonance and its accompanying cognitive changes. Three experiments were conducted using the conventional forced-compliance procedure. In Study 1, some of the 76 college student Ss were allowed to affirm an important, self-relevant value (by completing a self-relevant value scale) immediately after having written unrelated dissonant essays and prior to recording their attitudes on the postmeasure. Other Ss underwent an identical procedure but were selected so that the value affirmed by the scale was not part of their self-concept. The value scale eliminated dissonance-reducing attitude change among Ss for whom it was self-relevant but not among Ss for whom it was not self-relevant. This occurred even though the value scale could not resolve or reduce the objective importance of the dissonance-provoking inconsistency. Study 2, conducted with 24 Ss with a strong economic and political value orientation, showed that the self-affirmation effect was strong enough to prevent the reinstatement of dissonance. Study 3, testing generalizability with 24 Ss, replicated the effect by using a different attitude issue, a different value for affirmation, and a different measure of dissonance reduction. Results imply that a need for psychological consistency is not part of dissonance motivation and that salient, self-affirming cognitions may help objectify reactions to self-threatening information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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There are currently a large number of models which identify self-evaluation (self-esteem) as an important source of motivation. However, these models often posit qualitatively different antecedents and consequences. The present studies focus on the questions of whether these qualitatively different behavioral systems affect the same or different mediating variables, and whether the motivation is to maximize or simply maintain a particular level of self-evaluation. In Study 1 we found that providing subjects a “self affirmation” (Steele, 1988) opportunity reduced their propensity to engage in self-evaluation maintenance behaviors (SEM; Tesser, 1988). In Studies 2 and 3 we found that making salient positive SEM scenarios reduced the propensity to engage in dissonance reduction whereas making salient a threatening SEM scenario did not. These results were interpreted as indicating that these hypothetical self-systems affect the same mediating variable and that the motive is to maintain rather than maximize self-evaluation.
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The results of four studies suggest that people tend to generate and evaluate causal theories in a self-serving manner. They generate theories that view their own attributes as more predictive of desirable outcomes, and they are reluctant to believe in theories relating their own attributes to undesirable events. As a consequence, people tend to hold theories that are consistent with the optimistic belief that good things will happen to them and bad things will not. I argue that these self-serving biases are best explained as resulting from cognitive processes guided by motivation because they do not occur in the absence of motivational pressures.
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Defines involvement as a motivational state induced by an association between an activated attitude and the self-concept. Integration of the available research suggests that the effects of involvement on attitude change depended on the aspect of message recipients' self-concept that was activated to create involvement:(a) their enduring values (value- relevant involvement),(b) their ability to attain desirable outcomes (outcome-relevant involvement), or (c) the impression they make on others (impression-relevant involvement) ...
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The concept of biased systematic processing is usually introduced after the fact to explain deviant persuasion patterns. In contrast, the authors introduce the directed-thought technique, an experimental way to examine induced biased systematic processing. Supporting the efficacy of this technique, two experiments found that directions to think positively or negatively attenuated the effects of the quality of the message on persuasion, even when involvement was high and regardless of whether the message was pro-or counterattitudinal. Instructions to concentrate on negative thoughts also produced negative attitudes, whereas instructions to concentrate on positive thoughts produced positive attitudes. These results confirm a causal role for the valence of cognitive responses in persuasion, which prior research has suggested less directly. The authors make recommendations for the future use of the directed-thought technique, especially regarding its use in understanding the circumstances that can overcome positive or negative message recipient biases.
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To assess thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, and behavior related to AIDS, data were collected from 2 similar samples of college students. The sets of data were collected 18 months apart. Results indicate increased awareness and knowledge and changed attitudes and behaviors in some cases, but the absolute magnitudes of the differences are small for most between-group comparisons. Also, the evidence suggests that many students lack detailed knowledge and fail to see the implications of their knowledge for change in their own behavior. These findings imply educational efforts must go beyond merely providing knowledge and explicitly link facts to personal belief systems and decision making.
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This article contains a comprehensive, critical review of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)-risk-reduction literature on interventions that have targeted risky sexual behavior and intravenous drug use practices. A conceptually based, highly generalizable model for promoting and evaluating AIDS-risk behavior change in any population of interest is then proposed. The model holds that AIDS-risk reduction is a function of people's information about AIDS transmission and prevention, their motivation to reduce AIDS risk, and their behavioral skills for performing the specific acts involved in risk reduction. Supportive tests of this model, using structural equation modeling techniques, are then reported for populations of university students and gay male affinity group members.
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It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes--that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions. These ideas can account for a wide variety of research concerned with motivated reasoning.
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In this article, we show that people's evaluations of the seriousness of a health disorder are influenced by the perceived prevalence and personal relevance of that disorder. As part of a study ostensibly concerned with college students' health characteristics, 60 undergraduates were "tested" for the presence of a fictitious enzyme deficiency. The subjects discovered either that they had the deficiency (deficiency-present subjects) or that they did not have it (deficiency-absent subjects), and were led to believe either that 1 of the 5 people in the laboratory had the deficiency (low-prevalence subjects) or that 4 of them had it (high-prevalence subjects). As predicted, the low-prevalence subjects evaluated the deficiency as more serious than did the high-prevalence subjects. In addition, consistent with the view that personal relevance affects perceptions of health disorders, the deficiency-present subjects evaluated the deficiency as less serious than did the deficiency-absent subjects. The deficiency-present subjects also derogated the validity of the test ostensibly used to diagnose the deficiency compared with other subjects. Finally, the deficiency-present subjects requested more information about the deficiency than did the deficiency-absent subjects.
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In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.
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This research used the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) model of AIDS risk behavior change (J. D. Fisher & Fisher, 1992a) to reduce AIDS risk behavior in a college student population. College students received an IMB model-based intervention that addressed AIDS risk reduction information, motivation, and behavioral skills deficits that had been empirically identified in this population, or were assigned to a no-treatment control condition. At a 1-month follow-up, results confirmed that the intervention resulted in increases in AIDS risk reduction information, motivation, and behavioral skills, as well as significant increases in condom accessibility, safer sex negotiations, and condom use during sexual intercourse. At a long-term follow-up, the intervention again resulted in significant increases in AIDS preventive behaviors.
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The two experiments reported here were designed to show that a strong fear appeal could be more convincing than a weak one when (a) the communication is low in interest value and the dramatic nature of the "strong' communication makes it considerably more interesting than the "weak' communication, and (b) the communication is of low relevance to the actions of the audience There was little opinion change with the relatively uninteresting minimal fear lecture, while the degree of opinion change produced by the more interesting strong fear lecture was inversely related to the relevance of the material to the Ss.
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Within the framework of self-affirmation theory, the authors compared levels of dissonance reduction in the free-choice paradigm between a culture typical of an independent construal of self (Canadian) and a culture typical of an interdependent construal of self (Japanese). Whereas Canadian results virtually duplicated past self-affirmation findings with U.S. participants, Japanese results showed no dissonance reduction. This, the authors argue, is because such situations do not threaten core aspects of the interdependent self:
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Self-affirmation processes are being activated by information that threatens the perceived adequacy or integrity of the self and as running their course until this perception is restored through explanation, rationalization, and/or action. The purpose of these constant explanations (and rationalizations) is to maintain a phenomenal experience of the self-self-conceptions and images as adaptively and morally adequate—that is, as competent, good, coherent, unitary, stable, capable of free choice, capable of controlling important outcomes, and so on. The research reported in this chapter focuses on the way people cope with the implications of threat to their self-regard rather than on the way they cope with the threat itself. This chapter analyzes the way coping processes restore self-regard rather than the way they address the provoking threat itself.
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Subectsfor whom a health threat was relvant or irrelevant were recruited and matched on prior beliefs in the health threat. Following exposure to either a low- or a high-threat message, high-relvance subjects were less likely to believe in the threat. Consistent with earlier work, no evidence was found to suggest that defensive inattention to the messages mediated subjects' final beliefs. Instead, processing measures suggested that highrelevance subects processed threatening parts of both messages in a biased fashion. The relationship between biased judgment and biased processing is discussed, as are the difficulties in documenting the latter
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Research has yielded conflicting views of the adaptiveness of optimistic beliefs in confronting negative events and information. To test whether optimism functions like denial, the authors examined the prospective relation of optimistic beliefs to attention to threatening health information presented by computer in a college student sample (N= 57). Optimistic beliefs about one's health predicted greater attention to risk information than to neutral or benefit information and greater levels of recall overall, especially when the information was self-relevant. Results concerning attention to risk information were similar, but weaker, for dispositional optimism. Implications for theoretical treatments of optimistic beliefs are discussed.
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Recent versions of the heuristic-systematic model predict that defense-motivated people will process heuristic cues selectively in two ways: (a) Heuristic cues will be subject to biased evaluation, and (b) heuristic, rather than systematic, processing will predominate when cues support, rather than threaten, defensive concerns. This experiment presented college students with a proposed mandatory essay-exam program, giving opinion poll results as a heuristic cue, followed either by arguments both for and against essay exams, or by no arguments. Cues congenial to students' preferred test type were judged as more reliable than hostile cues when no arguments were presented. Systematic processing mediated attitude judgment only when the cue was hostile; when the cue was congenial, attitude judgment was more influenced by vested interest. This influence may represent a low-effort heuristic processing strategy specific to defense motivation.
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People often cling to beliefs even in the face of disconfirming evidence and interpret ambiguous information in a manner that bolsters strongly held attitudes. The authors tested a motivational account suggesting that these defensive reactions would be ameliorated by an affirmation of an alternative source of self-worth. Consistent with this interpretation, participants were more persuaded by evidence impugning their views toward capital punishment when they were self-affirmed than when they were not (Studies 1 and 2). Affirmed participants also proved more critical of an advocate whose arguments confirmed their views on abortion and less confident in their own attitudes regarding that issue than did unaffirmed participants (Study 3). Results suggest that assimilation bias and resistance to persuasion are mediated, in part, by identity-maintenance motivations.
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This chapter focuses on theory of cognitive dissonance. The proliferation of research testing and extending dissonance theory results for the most part from the generality and simplicity of the theory. Although it has been applied primarily in social psychological settings, it is not limited to social psychological phenomena such as interpersonal relations or feelings toward a communicator and his communication. Rather, its domain is in the widest of places—the skull of an individual organism. The core notion of the theory is extremely simple: Dissonance is a negative drive state that occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent. The very simplicity of the core of the theory is its greatest strength and most serious weakness. Many of the hypotheses that are obvious derivations from the theory are unique to that theory—that is, they could not be derived from any other theory. One of the intriguing aspects of dissonance theory is that it frequently leads to predictions that stand in apparent contradiction to those made by other theoretical approaches, most notably, to a general reward-incentive theory. The implication of the chapter is that dissonant situations are ubiquitous and that man expends a great deal of time and energy attempting to reduce dissonance. It should be obvious that man does many other things as well.
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Many college students engage in high levels of unsafe sexual behavior that puts them at risk for HIV infection. To better understand the dynamics underlying college students' unsafe behavior, focus group discussions were conducted with 308 students (146 men and 162 women). The results showed that, instead of consistently using condoms, many college students use implicit personality theories to judge the riskiness of potential sexual partners. Specifically, partners whom college students know and like are not perceived to be risky, even if what students know about these individuals is irrelevant to HIV status. The students determine the riskiness of partners they do not know well based on superficial characteristics that are also generally unrelated to HIV status. Therefore, AIDS prevention interventions for college students must expose the ineffectiveness of the students' use of implicit personality theories to determine potential partners' riskiness, and the “know your partner” safer sex guideline should be abandoned.
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The present research investigates how undergoing a negative or positive experience subsequently influences feedback seeking regarding self-attributes varying in self-relevance. Participants were offered feedback from earlier testing regarding their assets or liabilities for attaining various personal goals (general life goals or specific careers). Overall, self-relevance of a goal increased interest in both assets- and liabilities-focused feedback regarding that goal. As predicted, however, the effect of self-relevance depended on whether participants initially failed or succeeded on an unrelated task. Specifically, after failure, the self-relevance of a goal was more likely to increase interest in assets-focused feedback than interest in liabilities-focused feedback. In contrast, after success, the self-relevance of a goal was equally or more likely to increase interest in liabilities-focused feedback than interest in assets-focused feedback. These results suggest that undergoing a positive or negative experience subsequently influences the relative weight of ego-defensive and self-assessment motives in feedback-seeking decisions.
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There has been much interest in the role of dietary factors in the etiology and progression of breast disease. Due to its wide consumption and the many biochemical and physiologic effects it exerts, caffeine has been extensively examined in both clinical and experimental studies. To date, clinical studies investigating a possible relationship between caffeine consumption and breast disease in humans have yielded inconsistent and inconclusive results; further research is needed to resolve this uncertain relationship. In experimental studies utilizing laboratory rats and mice, caffeine has been shown to affect normal, hyperplastic, and carcinomatous mammae development. It has been proposed by many laboratories that antagonism of adenosine receptor is the most plausible mechanism to account for the many biologic activities of caffeine. However, other mechanisms by which caffeine may act cannot be discounted. Further research is needed to affirm the mechanism(s) by which caffeine acts, especially with regard to the developmental growth of normal, benign and carcinomatous human breast tissue.
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Reviews scientific and professional trends in the field of health psychology. I discuss recent research on health promotion, psychological factors in the development of illness, cognitive representations of health and illness, stress and coping, social support, interventions to promote coping, and trends that will affect progress in the field, such as the need for cost containment and the aging of the population.
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This paper presents a study which critically reviews the scientific literature on AIDS prevention programs in an attempt to determine the extent to which behavioral intervention research has demonstrated the efficacy of methods for risk behavior reduction. Its focus is on addressing the three most critical questions in intervention research: 1) have AIDS prevention programs had long-term success in behavior change; 2) what recommendations can be made to program developers; and 3) where should HIV prevention research be heading.
Article
It was predicted that high self-esteem Ss (HSEs) would rationalize an esteem-threatening decision less than low self-esteem Ss (LSEs), because HSEs presumably had more favorable self-concepts with which to affirm, and thus repair, their overall sense of self-integrity. This prediction was supported in 2 experiments within the "free-choice" dissonance paradigm--one that manipulated self-esteem through personality feedback and the other that varied it through selection of HSEs and LSEs, but only when Ss were made to focus on their self-concepts. A 3rd experiment countered an alternative explanation of the results in terms of mood effects that may have accompanied the experimental manipulations. The results were discussed in terms of the following: (a) their support for a resources theory of individual differences in resilience to self-image threats--an extension of self-affirmation theory, (b) their implications for self-esteem functioning, and (c) their implications for the continuing debate over self-enhancement versus self-consistency motivation.
Col lege stu dents use implicit per son al ity the ory instead of safer sex
  • S S Wil Liams
  • D L Kimble
  • N H Covell
  • L H Weiss
  • K J New Ton
  • J D Fisher
  • W A Fisher
Wil liams, S. S., Kimble, D. L., Covell, N. H., Weiss, L. H., New ton, K. J., Fisher, J. D., & Fisher, W. A. (1992). Col lege stu dents use implicit per son al ity the ory instead of safer sex. Jour nal of Applied Social Psy chol ogy, 22, 921-933.
Evo lu tion of col lege stu dents' AIDS-related behav ioral responses, atti tudes, knowl edge, and fear. AIDS Edu ca tion and Pre ven tion
  • J D Fisher
  • S J Misovich
Fisher, J. D., & Misovich, S. J. (1990). Evo lu tion of col lege stu dents' AIDS-related behav ioral responses, atti tudes, knowl edge, and fear. AIDS Edu ca tion and Pre ven tion, 2, 322-337.
Moti vated social cog ni tion: Prin ci ples of the inter face
  • A W Kruglanski
Kruglanski, A. W. (1996). Moti vated social cog ni tion: Prin ci ples of the inter face. In E. T. Hig gins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psy chology: Hand book of basic prin ci ples (pp. 493-520). New York: Guilford.
On the con flu ence of self-pro cesses
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