title: When failure feels better than success: Self-salience, self-consistency, and affect.
abstract: People like self-consistent feedback because it induces feelings of predictability and control, but they like positive feedback because it induces positive self-esteem. We show that self-salience determines whether people are more consistency- or positivity-driven. When self-knowledge is salient, people's primary responses (i.e., under load) are consistency-driven (people with low self-esteem feel better after negative feedback than after positive feedback, whereas people with high self-esteem feel better after positive feedback than after negative feedback) and controlled responses are positivity-driven (people feel better after positive feedback than after negative feedback, regardless of self-consistency). Without salient self-knowledge this pattern reverses: people's primary responses are positivity-driven, whereas people's controlled responses are consistency-driven.
authors.affiliation: Tilburg Centre for Cognition and Communication & Tilburg Institute of Behavioral Economics Research, Tilburg University, The Netherlands. m.k.noordewier@uvt.nl
authors.forename: Marret K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Noordewier
authors.forename: Diederik A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Stapel
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D012649:Self Concept