Abstract
Although people generally endorse intrinsic goals for growth, intimacy, and community more than extrinsic goals for money, appearance, and popularity, people sometimes over-emphasize extrinsic goals, to the potential detriment of their well-being. When and why does this occur? Results from three experimental studies show that psychological threat increases the priority that people give to extrinsic compared to intrinsic goals. This was found in the case of existential threat (Study 1), economic threat (Studies 2), and interpersonal threat (Study 3). Discussion focuses on the possible reasons why threat breeds extrinsic orientations.
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Notes
Kasser and Sheldon (2000) employed a “listening to music” control condition rather than the “watching TV” condition sometimes used by terror management researchers, because of TV’s association with advertising and other extrinsic messages. Notably, mortality salience manipulations typically do not yield effects upon self-reports of mood or anxiety, presumably because they act by priming non-conscious rather than conscious insecurities regarding death (Greenberg et al. 1997). Thus, consistent with the approach of other researchers in this area, there was no self-report manipulation check in this study.
Although it is possible to examine the six values separately, we do not report such results in this article both because we had no hypotheses regarding the separate values, and also because no clear pattern of effects emerged across the three studies for the values taken singly. However, we would be happy to send these results to curious readers, upon request.
No manipulation checks were given in Study 3; instead we relied on past findings indicating that the contingently-accepting other visualization induces greater insecurity and defensiveness, as indexed by greater self-handicapping (Arndt et al. 2002), greater desire for downward social comparison information (Schimel et al. 2001), and greater accessibility of rejection words (Baldwin and Sinclair 1996).
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Sheldon, K.M., Kasser, T. Psychological threat and extrinsic goal striving. Motiv Emot 32, 37–45 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-008-9081-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-008-9081-5