Your money or your self-esteem: threatened egotism promotes costly entrapment in losing endeavors.

Full Abstract

The present research explored egotism-maintaining favorable views of the self-as a motivation underlying entrapment in losing endeavors. Four studies suggested that threatened selfesteem would cause decision makers to invest and lose more money in a previously chosen course of action. Ego-threatened participants consistently lost more money than nonthreatened participants across diverse entrapping situations regardless of whether the outcome was ostensibly determined by luck (Experiments 1 and 4), ability (Experiment 2), or interpersonal competition (Experiment 3). Thus, pursuing favorable views of the self could be costly to decision makers' financial well-being and may produce self-defeating behaviors.

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Author information

Author/s: Zhang, Liqing (L); Baumeister, Roy F (RF);

Affiliation: Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. liqingz(-atsign-)andrew.cmu.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial

Journal: Personality and social psychology bulletin (Pers Soc Psychol Bull), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 32 (issue 7) : pp 881-93

Dates: Created 2006/06/01; Completed 2006/11/07;

PMID: 16738022, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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