What makes people choose within-domain versus across-domain compensation following a self-threat? The role of self-verification motives

ABSTRACT

Consumers who experience a psychological threat may compensate by acquiring a product that directly boosts the threatened aspect of their self-concept (i.e., within-domain compensation), or they may compensate by acquiring a product that boosts an unrelated aspect of their self-concept (i.e., across-domain compensation). The current research investigates how self-verification motives influence consumers’ preference between these two compensation strategies. In two studies, participants with a self-verification motive displayed an increased preference for within- (vs. across-) domain compensatory products following a self-threat. Underlying this effect, those with a self-verification motive reported a greater desire for products that re-confirmed the threatened domain of their self-concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Compensatory consumption
• self-verification
• self-threat
• within-domain
• across-domain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mandel et al. (2017) explicitly call for future research on this topic in research question 1 of pg. 141.

2. Consistent with recent compensatory consumption literature (Mandel et al., 2017, p. 134), as well as the notion that people tend to have positive views of themselves (Diener & Diener, 1996), the current research considers consumers’ self-concept prior to a threat as how they generally want to see themselves.

3. Of note, the need to self-verify should not be mutually exclusive of the need to self-enhance, such that these motives do not necessarily always operate independently and/or compete with one another. Instead, consumers that may be motivated to self-enhance by default should simply become relatively more concerned with self-concept stability when they are in situations that activate a self-verification motive.

4. r represents the Pearson’s correlation coefficient.

5. α represents Chronbach’s alpha, which is a measure of the internal consistency for three or more measures.