PROSPECT 3 self affirmation provide a broader perspective on self threat

Procedure. When signing up for the study (at least 24 hr before the lab component), participants completed a measure of dispositional self-esteem, modified from Rosenberg (1965). This served as a broad self-assessment.

Once participants arrived at the lab, those assigned to the affirmation condition completed a values-based affirmation. Participants ranked eight values or skills (e.g., adventure in life, financial success).2 Participants then took 3 min to write about why their most valued domain was meaningful in their own life.3 We positioned the self-affirmation manipulation prior to the test so that it would not serve as a distraction in between the threat and the final measures, a worry some-times expressed when self-affirmations are positioned later (Steele, 1988).

Next, all participants were told that they would complete a test that measured “integrative orientation ability,” supposedly a test of “creative thinking skills that are particularly diagnostic of success in professional careers.” The test was a modification of the Remote Associates Test (Mednick, 1962) used in previous research to induce threat (Critcher, Dunning, & Armor, 2010). Participants received 15 word triads. For each triad, participants had to generate a fourth word that connected to each of the provided words. For example, one triad read “STALK–TRAINER–KING.”4

After the remote associates test, participants completed 14 items measuring their feelings of self-worth, asking them “how well each statement characterizes how you feel about yourself right now.” A principal components analysis with varimax rotation found that items loaded on two orthogonal factors. To assess participants’ views of their own abilities specific to the tested domain, participants indicated their agreement that “I feel I am pretty good at tests like the one I took today,” on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 9 (extremely). This served as a narrow self-assessment.

PROSPECT 2 – self affirmation improves problem solving under stress

Procedure

Participantscompleted an experiment ostensibly about intelligence and performance. Participants were informed that a trained evaluator would administer the performance task. Participants were randomly assigned either to the self-affirmation or control condition. In both cases, they rated 11 values (i.e., art, business, friends/family) in order of personal importance. Next, they wrote about their first ranked value and why it was important to them (self-affirmation condition) or their ninth ranked value and why it might be important to others (control condition) [12]. Following the self-affirmation writing task, as a manipulation check, participants were asked to respond to two items assessing how important the value they wrote about was, using a 6-point response scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 6= Strongly Agree). Items were, ‘‘This value has influenced my life’’ and ‘‘This value is an important part of who I am’’ (study a = .96). Participants then completed a state mood adjective checklist assessing state positive mood (5 items: proud, content, joyful, love, and grateful; study a = .84) and state negative mood (3 items: sad, angry, scared; study a = .65) (PANAS-X; [22,23]).

144 RAT items have been normed for difficulty [17], and pilot testing indicated that our undergraduate sample population can solve all easy RAT items. We thus selected 30 challenging RAT items ranging in difficulty from moderately to extremely difficult. For each RAT item, participants saw three words on a computer screen (e.g., flake, mobile, cone) and were asked to generate a fourth word (e.g., snow) that when combined with each of the three stimulus words results in a common word pair used in everyday English language. They were given 12 seconds to provide an answer verbally. The evaluator provided veridical verbal performance feedback (incorrect, correct) after each response and recorded each response. In order to create performance pressure, the evaluator provided evaluative feedback three times during the 30 RAT trials (‘‘I need you to try harder’’).

After completing the performance task, the evaluator left the room and the experimenter re-entered and indicated that the participant was to rest quietly (5 minute recovery period). Participants then completed individual difference measures, including the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale [26] to assess perceived stress over the last month (all items were summed to form a composite index of chronic stress, study a = .87). To reduce potential confounding effects, we administered these measures at the end of the experimental session because previous studies indicate that completing individual difference measures at the beginning of an experimental session may act as an affirmation manipulation (i.e., they have carry-over effects) [27]. After completing individual difference measures, participants were debriefed, compensated, and excused.

PROSPECT 1 – the effect of self-affirmation in nonthreatening persuasion domains: timing affects the process

EXPERIMENT 1

Experiment 1 was designed to examine whether self-affirmation, when it precedes a message, can influence attitude change by affecting the degree of information processing. The extent to which participants processed information was assessed by varying the quality of the arguments contained within the message and by measuring the impact of these arguments on attitudes. When people are differentially affected by strong and weak persuasive messages, it suggests that they have carefully attended to and thought about the merits of the information (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In this

experiment, relative to a control group, we expected affirmed participants to think less about the message content. This should result in smaller differences in the attitudes of self-affirmed participants (relative to no-affirmation control participants) to the strong versus weak proposal.

Method

Participants and Design

Students were randomly assigned to the cells of a 2 (self-affirmation: affirmation vs. no affirmation) × 2 (argument quality: strong vs. weak) between participants factorial design.

Procedure

Participants were told that they were going to participate in two different research projects. The first study was described as a project about values and their influ ence on daily life situations (self-affirmation manipulation). After selecting a series of values from Grimm and colleagues’ Individualism-Collectivism Scale (ICS; Grimm, Church, Katigbak, & Reyes, 1999), half of the participants listed experiences related to their most important values (affirmation condition) or their least important values (no affirmation condition). The second part of the experiment was presented as a research study for a new cell phone marketing campaign, and participants were asked to evaluate the advertisement. Participants received a strong or weak version of a message in favor of a new cell phone and were then asked to report their attitudes toward the cell phone.with the most important of the selected values. In contrast, people in the no-self-affirmation condition had to select the 3 least important values from the ICS and write about three situations associated with their least important value. Two judges coded the content of those situations associated with the values. As anticipated, participants wrote about instances in which they acted consistent with the values listed.2

Argument quality. Participants were exposed to a message containing information about a new cell phone. The advertisement contained either strong or weak arguments in favor of

the new product. This manipulation was designed to assess the extent to which people were care-fully examining the content of the message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). The arguments selected have been used successfully in previous research and produce the appropriate pattern of thoughts (Briñol et al., 2004). That is, the strong arguments elicited mostly favorable thoughts and the weak arguments elicited mostly unfavorable thoughts when people were instructed to think carefully about them. The gist of some of the strong arguments in favor of the new cell phone stated that Ginex is water-proof, shock-resistant, and extremely low in battery consumption and that it includes a calendar, an alarm, and a video recorder. The gist of some of the weak arguments stated that Ginex has a clock, is able to convert international currencies with a sophisticated formula, and has only a 2-digit password. In the weak message, it was also noted that Ginex was investing a great deal of money in an ad campaign, which meant it would be popular soon and thus a good choice. 3

Dependent Variables

Manipulation check. To determine whether the self-affirmation manipulation was perceived as personally important, all participants had to rate the personal importance of the three selected values on a single scale ranging from 1 (not important) to 7 (most important). Two participants did not complete this measure so the degrees of freedom will vary in the analyses below.

Attitudes. To assess attitudes toward the Ginex cell phone, participants indicated their assessment of the phone using a series of 9-point semantic differential scales. These scales were anchored at bad–good, unattractive–attractive, not recommended–recommended, and useless–useful.