Fear Not, For You Can Help! The Effect of Fear of Failure And Self-Construal on Charitable Giving

Extant literature offers mixed findings as to how people respond to having an aspect of the self threatened, reporting both social contact seeking (Maner et al. 2007), and avoiding behavior (Murray et al. 2006). We propose that whether people might want to draw closer to others when threatened by a specific type of threat, fear of failure (FF; Rhodewalt 1990), depends on self-construal (Markus and Kitayama 1991). FF is a dispositional tendency to avoid situations with possible negative outcomes due to the risk of feeling ashamed of failure (Elliot & Thrash 2004). FF has been considered as a form of self-threat (Sherman et al. 1984), and an aversive state (Fiske and Taylor 1991) that reduces control over one’s life (Hogg and Mullin 1999). FF presents a potential link to self-construal (Singelis 1994), the extent to which individuals define themselves as individuals or as parts of groups (Agrawal, Maheswaran 2005). As separate construals of the self may be differentially sensitive to personal control (Hamilton and Biehal 2005), they might also differentially react to a loss of personal control caused by FF. An independent self-construal will likely rely on own thoughts and feelings for resolving the negative feelings caused by FF, whereas an interdependent self-construal will likely rely on input from other group members. Thus, we propose that compared to independent self-construals, interdependent self-construals are more likely to respond to a threat via embracing others.