Walking Away from Compensatory Consumption: Self-Acceptance Changes Threat Appraisal

Consumer behavior researchers have documented that individuals frequently try to avoid threatening information by engaging in compensatory consumption—the increased purchase of or actual consumption of goods in response to self-threats (Rucker and Galinsky forthcoming). However, compensatory consumption could potentially yield harmful consequences, such as overeating and overspending (Tice et al. 2001). Moreover, while compensatory consumption might temporally relieve emotional distress arising from self-threats, it can lead to post-consumption guilt (Arnow et al. 1992). Here, we introduce a model of threat resolution illuminating that individuals might be able to reduce their reliance on post-threat compensatory consumption by changing their appraisal of threats from harmful to their self-worth (which would lead to defensive responses to protect their self-worth, e.g., compensatory consumption) to benign to self-worth (which would make defensive responses superfluous). We specifically focus on the role of unconditional self-acceptance (i.e., detaching one’s sense of self-worth from one’s current self-assessment: Chamberlain and Hagga 2001; Williams and Lynn 2010) in shaping threat appraisal, positing that those who practice unconditional self-acceptance (vs. those who do not) will tend to appraise otherwise threatening information as benign rather than as impinging on their self-worth. As such, we posit that these individuals will be less likely to try to protect themselves through engaging in compensatory consumption and more open to directly facing and improving on the threatened dimension.