Self-Affirmation Moderates Self-Congruency Effect in Health Messaging

ABSTRACT

Previous research found that health risk messages framed to be congruent with people’s independent or interdependent self-construal were not consistently more effective than incongruent messages. We argue that people potentially process the self-construal congruent health risk messages in a biased manner. To test this proposition, we examined the role of self-affirmation, which is expected to reduce defensive processing, in college nonsmokers’ responses to an antismoking message congruent vs. incongruent with their dominant self-construals. Results from an online experiment suggested that self-affirmation moderated the self-congruency effect. Specifically, among college nonsmokers endorsing a dominant interdependent self-construal, self-congruency effect emerged only when the group was engaged in self-affirmation. Among college nonsmokers endorsing a dominant independent self-construal, with no prior affirmation, the group reported self-incongruent messages better than the self-congruent messages. After being engaged in self-affirmation, the group reported similar effects for self-congruent and self-incongruent messages. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.

Additional information

Funding

B.Y.’s time revising this paper when she was at Georgia State University was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products under Grant [P50DA036128]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or FDA.