Making an Impact on the Self: How Sounds and Colors Increase Goal Engagement

Imagine completing a form to indicate how much money you want to donate to charity. Now imagine that, for some reason, you receive a bright orange pen to complete this form. Would this visually impactful ink color influence your donation? Would it influence how you see yourself? People will make goal-consistent choices when they believe these choices matter for the goal outcome, or for their own self-concept (i.e., self-signaling; Bodner and Prelec 1996; Prelec and Bodner 2003). Thus, a person will donate money to charity because it will save lives, or because it will make her feel more generous—or both. Many factors can make a choice seem consequential for the self-concept. For example, explicitly linking a choice to an identity (e.g., be a voter; Bryan, Walton, Rogers, and Dweck 2011), or positioning a choice at the beginning or end of a sequence (Touré-Tillery and Fishbach 2012) promote adherence to goals by making choices seem more representative of the self, or self-diagnostic. These patterns of behavior occur because individuals are motivated to maintain a positive self-concept (Gao, Wheeler, and Shiv 2009; Schlenker 1985) and will “do the right thing” when it seems most telling of the self. Research shows individuals for whom outcomes are typically experienced as dependent upon their own actions tend to develop an internal locus of control, and become more likely to exert themselves when engaged in important tasks (Rotter 1966). We propose the immediate perceptual effect of an action, although irrelevant for goal pursuit, will operate as a type of contingent outcome. Producing a visual contrast when writing with a bright color on a form printed in black, or producing sound while clicking through webpages will increase people’s sense of control and responsibility for that action. Thus, we hypothesize that actions with such visual or auditory impact will seem more self-diagnostic, and hence will increase adherence to valued goals, because individuals wish to maintain a positive self-concept. Three experiments confirmed our hypotheses for pro-social and voting goals.