Your money or your self-esteem: threatened egotism promotes costly entrapment in losing endeavors.
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.
Zhang
Liqing
L
Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. liqingz@andrew.cmu.edu
Baumeister
Roy F
RF
D000339:Affect; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003657:Decision Making; D004467:Economics; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007721:Knowledge of Results, Psychological; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010551:Personality; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012649:Self Concept; D014481:United States