| Popis: |
The experience of self-threat – or threat to the view of oneself as a capable and deserving person – can often derail the pursuit of one’s most important goals. Through decades of research, self-affirmation has proven to be an effective strategy for combatting self-threat. However, little is known about the natural occurrence of self-affirmation for combatting self-threats in the real-world, outside of laboratory and intervention settings. The current line of work takes a self-regulatory approach to studying self-affirmation: seeking to understand the impact of the beliefs that people have about the benefits of self-affirmation in combatting self-threat. Across three field studies, we examined (1) the accuracy of the beliefs that people have about the benefits of self-affirmation, and (2) whether beliefs accuracy was related to real-world outcomes. Replicating prior work (Reeves et al., under review), we found that on average people have accurate situation differentiation beliefs (i.e. they know in which types of situations self-affirmation in beneficial), but struggle when it comes to comparative efficacy beliefs (i.e. they do not see self-affirmation as more beneficial that a control strategy, in situations of self-threat). When examining the effect of the individual differences in beliefs accuracy on real-world outcomes, results revealed that accurate comparative efficacy beliefs attenuated the threat experienced by single individuals who were seeking a committed relationship on Valentine’s Day (Study 1) and reduced the amount of prejudice expressed by avid English soccer fans toward Black players following England’s loss of the Euro 2020 tournament (Study 3). Despite these promising findings, accurate beliefs about the benefits of self-affirmation failed to predict the majority the outcomes of interest. In sum, these studies provide initial evidence for the relationship between self-affirmation beliefs and real-world outcomes, but also signal the need for future work to more effectively study this relationship. |
