Reducing contingent self-worth: A defensive response to self-threats

ABSTRACT

Previous research shows that people with high self-esteem cope with threats to the self by reducing the extent to which their self-worth is contingent on the threatened domain (Buckingham, Weber, & Sypher, 2012). The present studies tested the hypothesis that this is a defensive process. In support of this hypothesis, Study 1 (N = 160), showed that self-affirmation attenuates the tendency for people with high self-esteem to reduce their contingencies of self-worth following self-threat. Furthermore, Study 2 (N = 286), showed that this tendency was more prevalent among people with defensive self-esteem than among those with secure self-esteem. The present studies imply that reducing contingent self-worth after self-threat is a defensive process. We discuss implications for theories of contingent self-worth.

KEYWORDS:

• Contingencies of self-worth
• defensiveness
• implicit self-esteem
• self-affirmation
• self-esteem

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/2ngs9/registrations/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/2ngs9/registrations/

Notes

1. Gender did not moderate any of the findings reported in this article.

2. Although it is typical in self-affirmation research to have participants in the control condition complete a non-affirmational writing exercise, a pilot study we conducted showed that using a control condition in which participants wrote about why their least important value may be important to someone else reduced the strength of the Self-Esteem × Threat interaction effect on approval CSW.

3. All data for both studies are publicly available on the following registered page:

https://osf.io/2ngs9/registrations/.