Strategies to Cope with Social Identity Threats: Defending the Self without Sabotaging Self-Control

Consumers often encounter situations when important aspects of their identities are negatively evaluated and threatened. Imagine a sports fan who watches his beloved team lose to an objectively “worse” opponent. Or consider the experience of a college student majoring in business who reads that business students perform worse academically than engineering students. Situations such as these abound in the lives of consumers, devaluing key elements of their social identities, and causing them to seek effective ways to cope with these threats to the self. Social identity threats cause aversive psychological consequences (Baumgardner 1990), which motivate consumers to repair their self-worth (Tajfel and Turner 1986). Unfortunately, coping with social identity threats negatively impacts consumers’ self-control and hinders their ability to act in accord with long-term goals (Inzlicht and Kang 2010; Inzlicht, McKay, and Aronson 2006). While the detrimental impact of social identity threats on self-control has been demonstrated, there are few insights as to whether different coping strategies are equally costly to self-control. An interesting question, then, is whether certain strategies are more damaging to consumers’ self-control than others. Might some strategies allow consumers to restore their self-worth following social identity threat without significantly undermining self-control?