Helping Others by First Affirming the Self: When Self-Affirmation Reduces Ego-Defensive Downplaying of Others’ Misfortunes

Abstract

We show that self-affirmation increases helping behavior toward others in need. We argue that as awareness of others’ pain causes discomfort, individuals are often motivated to ignore information about such pain. However, ignoring others’ suffering implies that one is not a good and caring person, which presents a threat to self-integrity. To resolve this conflict, people might downplay others’ pain. Studies show that self-affirmation intervenes in this process, thereby increasing willingness to help (Studies 1-4). Findings further show that self-affirmation leads people to attend more closely to information about others’ difficulties (Study 2) and to construe others’ pain as a pressing need instead of an ordinary hardship (Study 3). Study 4 provides evidence supporting the ego-defensive account and rules out an alternative account based on other-directed emotions. Studies 1 to 4 also reveal that the effect of self-affirmation is more pronounced among people who are less likely to identify with victims.

Keywords

self-affirmation prosocial behavior acknowledgment of others’ misfortunes ego-defensive processing

The tragic but ordinary deaths of people in situations in which people are likely to die don’t usually change policy.

―Jill Lepore (2016, p. 48)

Attending to others’ misfortunes and being aware of the pain and distress they cause play a central role in initiating efforts to help (Batson, Early, & Salvarani, 1997; Simpson, Ickes, & Blackstone, 1995). However, people might fail to help others when information about others’ suffering generates personal discomfort (Batson et al., 1997; Batson, O’Quin, Fultz, Vanderplas, & Isen, 1983). In such cases, people may want to disregard information about others’ misfortunes as a way to avoid these difficult feelings. Ignoring the misfortunes of others, however, may imply that one is not a good and caring person (Hoffman, 1981; O’Connor & Cuevas, 1982), which can create a threat to self-integrity.

Prior work suggests that when a situation imposes a threat to individuals’ self-integrity, they tend to construe the situation in a way that protects their sense of self (Critcher & Dunning, 2015; D. A. K. Sherman, Nelson, & Steele, 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006). Accordingly, we propose that individuals may ego-defensively downplay others’ misfortunes so as to justify distancing themselves from, and thus not helping to alleviate, those misfortunes. If they believe that other people’s pain is inconsequential, they not only avoid having to fully experience the discomfort of knowing others’ pain, but they can also justify not helping without incurring a threat to their self-concept. For instance, as described in the opening quote by Jill Lepore, others’ tragic misfortunes might be construed as an ordinary part of life—a construal that curbs any impulse to address those misfortunes. In other words, attending to others’ misfortunes feels uncomfortable, but ignoring them carries the burden of making one feel like a bad person; therefore, the way out of this bind is to construe others’ misfortunes as not that bad after all, or at least not out of the ordinary, and therefore not worthy of one’s attention.

Across four studies, we test the hypothesis that individuals might ego-defensively downplay others’ suffering. We further examine whether self-affirmation (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002) might reduce this inclination, thereby allowing people to acknowledge others’ suffering as a basis for action. A commonly used self-affirmation task involves reflecting on important aspects of one’s life, such as by recalling an experience in which an important, long-held value played a significant role (McQueen & Klein, 2006; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002). Prior work on self-affirmation suggests that even simple reminders of one’s values may be sufficient to affirm one’s sense of self and, in turn, to reduce the tendency to respond defensively to self-threat (Cohen, Aronson, & Steele, 2000; Schumann, 2014; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000). Therefore, if individuals ego-defensively process others’ misfortunes to protect their self-integrity, self-affirmation may change individuals’ responses toward others’ suffering (e.g., construal of, or attention to, others’ misfortunes), thus increasing their willingness to help those others. We explore the theoretical underpinnings of this account in the following sections.

Barriers to Acknowledging Others’ Misfortunes

As described in the introduction, we propose that people might downplay others’ misfortunes, and consequently the need to address them, to maintain their self-integrity (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006; Steele, 1988). Consistent with this account, prior work has shown that witnessing others’ misfortunes can cause personal discomfort (Batson et al., 1997, 1983). In such circumstances, people might want to ignore and disregard the agitating information about others’ misfortunes. However, this approach also creates a need for ego-defensive processing, because ignoring others’ problems is associated with unfavorable personal traits and drives (Hoffman, 1981; O’Connor & Cuevas, 1982). That is, while ignoring others’ misfortunes may spare one from the distress of knowing others’ troubles, it also implies that one is not a moral person who cares about others, which provokes a threat to self-integrity.

When a situation poses such a threat to self-integrity, individuals become motivated to reduce it by engaging in ego-defensive reactions (Harris & Napper, 2005; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006; Steele, 1988). Ego-defensive reactions to self-threat include distorted cognitions, whereby individuals construe a situation in a way that renders it less threatening to their sense of self-worth. For example, prior research has shown that heavy coffee drinkers aggressively counterargue messages about the detrimental health effects of coffee to avoid the self-threatening conclusion that their decision to drink it is not sensible (Chaiken, 1992; Kunda, 1987; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000).

Following a similar logic, we propose that, to address the self-threatening implications of disregarding others’ misfortunes, people may ego-defensively downplay the magnitude or pressing nature of these misfortunes. Such downplaying might involve assessing other people’s troubles and pains as relatively inconsequential and thus not worthy of one’s help. In cases in which others’ troubles are clearly of substantial magnitude (e.g., when they involve the death of a loved one, serious illness, or financial ruin), people might downplay others’ misfortunes by incorporating them into a sense that “life is hard” and thus many pains and hardships are simply to be expected. This view allows one to view others’ tragedies as ordinary and even mundane and thus, again, not worthy of their attention, as in the opening quote describing the “tragic but ordinary” nature of death in situations where people are likely to die.

By downplaying others’ misfortunes in this way, people can allow themselves to believe that they are not ignoring others’ suffering simply out of their own selfish desire to avoid feeling discomfort; as a consequence, their lack of action toward others’ suffering is no longer threatening to their self-integrity. To test our hypothesis, we adopted a self-affirmation task that has been shown in prior work to reduce individuals’ ego-defensive tendencies (Harris & Napper, 2005; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002).

Self-Affirmation as a Means of Enhancing Acknowledgment of Others’ Misfortunes

The effectiveness of self-affirmation rests on the premise that individuals are motivated to maintain their own perceived worth and integrity (Steele, 1988), particularly when their sense of self is at stake. In the past two decades, numerous empirical studies have shown that self-affirmation reduces individuals’ ego-defensive tendencies (Critcher & Dunning, 2015; Harris & Napper, 2005; Schumann, 2014; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006). Following self-affirmation, people feel more secure in their self-integrity and less pressure to defend a particular aspect of the self. As a consequence, individuals become more open-minded toward potentially self-threatening situations (Cohen et al., 2000; Nelson, Fuller, Choi, & Lyubomirsky, 2014; Schumann, 2014; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002; Toma & Hancock, 2013). Returning to the prior example of heavy coffee drinkers, those who were self-affirmed did not need to ego-defensively protect their coffee consumption and could therefore acknowledge the content of messages showcasing its possible negative health effects (Chaiken, 1992; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000).

Most of the above-cited studies on self-affirmation have focused on people’s construal of themselves or behavioral changes that benefit them (Lindsay & Creswell, 2014; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006). In contrast, the current research examines how self-affirmation changes individuals’ attitudes and promotes behaviors that help others. A few recent studies have shown that self-affirmation can enhance prosocial behavior. For example, Thomaes, Bushman, de Castro, and Reijntjes (2012) conducted two longitudinal field experiments showing that self-affirmation can increase young adolescents’ prosocial behaviors. In a laboratory study, Lindsay and Creswell (2014) also showed that self-affirmation increased prosocial behaviors. Interestingly, these authors traced their finding to increased feelings of compassion toward the self (vs. others) but did not elaborate this mechanism in the article. Such studies provide evidence that self-affirmation can increase prosocial actions, possibly by increasing prosocial feelings (Crocker, Niiya, & Mischkowski, 2008; Thomaes et al., 2012), but the fundamental question of why this is the case remains unanswered.

We propose a novel influence of self-affirmation—specifically, that self-affirmation makes individuals less likely to ego-defensively downplay others’ suffering. Prior work on self-affirmation has shown that the need for self-integrity makes nonaffirmed individuals narrowly self-interested and prevents them from focusing on the needs of others (Crocker, Olivier, & Nuer, 2009; Thomaes et al., 2012). We propose that a mind-set attuned to self-interest might make individuals ego-defensively downplay others’ suffering to disregard uncomfortable information about others’ misfortunes while maintaining their self-integrity. However, self-affirmation can reduce such ego-defensive reactions, allowing individuals to acknowledge others’ misfortunes.

To support the proposed mechanism, we explore self-affirmation’s influence on people’s attentiveness toward and construal of others’ misfortunes. First, we show that self-affirmation leads individuals to become more attentive toward others’ suffering. For example, compared with nonaffirmed individuals, affirmed individuals spent more time reading information about others’ misfortunes. Second, we show that self-affirmation affects the construal of others’ misfortunes, as affirmed individuals are less likely to ego-defensively construe others’ misfortunes as, for instance, commonplace examples of the difficulties of everyday life. In addition, we compare the ego-defensive account with an alternative account that self-affirmation might enhance helping by increasing general other-directed emotions (i.e., the other-directed emotion account; Crocker et al., 2008).

Moderation by Victim Identification

We also test the proposed mechanism by employing a theoretically meaningful moderator—identification with the victim. We suggest that individuals’ motivation to protect the self begins with their desire to distance themselves from others’ misfortunes. That is, to the extent that individuals are motivated to ignore others’ misfortunes, they will feel a need to ego-defensively justify their willful ignorance to preserve their self-integrity. Conversely, if people are not motivated to ignore others’ misfortunes (e.g., because they have a vested concern in them), they will not feel a threat to self-integrity and thus will not need to ego-defensively underestimate others’ suffering.

Hence, we predict that the self-affirmation effect will be stronger among people who are more motivated to ignore other’s misfortunes because they will feel a greater need to ego-defensively justify their ignorance to avoid negative implications for the self. We further predict that identification with the victims changes the extent to which individuals are motivated to turn a blind eye to others’ misfortunes. Specifically, people who can readily identify with the victim should be less motivated to downplay the suffering than those who cannot. For example, people with children would be less likely than people without children to construe the suffering of parents whose children have been injured or killed by defective products as just one of the challenges of life. High-identifiers would appreciate the suffering and share the call to action, whereas low-identifiers—although they might be well aware that ignoring such pain is heartless and that failing to help to change how children’s products are made and tested is potentially immoral—will nonetheless want to ignore the situation because the suffering makes them feel uncomfortable. This latter group is the one for which we predict a stronger effect of self-affirmation.

Study Overview

Across four studies, we tested the role of self-affirmation as a means to enhance helping intention and behavior toward others in need. In Study 1, we showed that self-affirmation increased individuals’ willingness to share information in their social networks about others’ unfortunate stories and the charitable organization intended to help the victims. We treated sharing as an indication of prosocial behavior because it suggests interest in and support for those facing hardships. For example, if a Facebook user “shares” information about a local charity, the information appears not only on the user’s page but also on the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link to the charity website. We found that self-affirmation was effective in increasing willingness to share information about the charity only among individuals who were less likely to identify with the victims (i.e., low-identifiers) and therefore more likely to ignore their misfortunes. In Study 2, we showed that self-affirmation increased donation by increasing time spent on reading the information about others’ misfortunes among low-identifiers, but not among high-identifiers. In Study 3, we provided further evidence for the proposed mechanism by showing that self-affirmation made low-identifiers, but not high-identifiers, less likely to construe others’ misfortunes as ordinary difficulties in life. Study 4 investigated an alternative explanation to the present ego-defensive account, specifically one based on increased other-directed feelings (i.e., transcendence of the self) as a basis for increased helping behavior under self-affirmation.

Study 1

In Study 1, we examined the effect of self-affirmation on individuals’ willingness to share stories about others’ misfortunes through social networks (e.g., Facebook). We predicted that self-affirmation would increase individuals’ willingness to spread such information and that this self-affirmation effect would be particularly pronounced when individuals did not closely identify with the victims.

Participants and Design

A total of 204 participants (120 women, M age = 34.78) from a national online subject pool using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) participated in the study.¹ Each participant was paid US$1.0. We adopted materials about a real nongovernment organization. We employed a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects design.

Procedure

Participants first engaged in the self-affirmation task, then, they were given materials about a charity that addressed defective products for children. Participants with children were considered high-identification participants (N = 95), whereas those without children were considered low-identification participants (N = 109).

Pretest

Our predictions for the effect of self-affirmation hinge on the conflict between the desire to ignore others’ misfortunes (especially among those low in victim identification) and the belief that doing so makes one a bad person morally, which creates a threat to self-integrity. A central component of our argument, therefore, is that people do indeed believe that ignoring others’ misfortunes is immoral and that these beliefs do not differ for low and high victim identification. To test this assertion, we conducted a pretest with 60 participants, 28 with children and 32 without children. To all participants, we presented four items regarding the moral implications of ignoring the pain of parents whose children are injured or killed by defective children’s products on a 7-point scale (e.g., “Not paying attention to the suffering of these parents is” and “Ignoring these parents’ needs regarding children’s safety is”: 1 = immoral, 7 = moral; α = .90). Consistent with our expectations, the results showed that participants without children (M = 2.06, SD = 0.92) did not differ from those with children (M = 1.77, SD = 1.00) in terms of their endorsement of the moral value, t(58) = 1.19, p = .24, d = 0.30.

Self-affirmation manipulation

Adopting the procedure of the classic self-affirmation task (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2006), we asked all participants to first rank a set of values (e.g., artistic skills, sense of humor, athletics) in order of personal importance. After the ranking task, we asked participants to write an essay about one of the values. In the self-affirmation condition, participants wrote about their most important value and why it was important and meaningful to them. In the no self-affirmation condition, participants wrote about their least important value and why others might find it important and meaningful.

Willingness to “share” charity materials in social networks

Next, participants read information published by Kids In Danger (KID), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children by publicizing defective children’s products. The materials described actual accidents involving defective products that injured children. We then measured participants’ willingness to share the KID materials with their Facebook friends (1 = not at all, 7 = very much), which served as our main dependent variable. We predicted that nonaffirmed participants would be less willing than affirmed participants to share the KID materials and that this effect would be particularly strong among participants without children (i.e., low-identifiers).

Results

Content analysis of the self-affirmation task

In the self-affirmation task, all participants ranked 12 values and then wrote about the value that was either most important or least important to them. Therefore, it is possible that participants in each condition could have systematically selected different values to write about. To ensure our effects were not driven by specific values, we conducted a chi-square analysis of the values participants chose. This analysis revealed no systematic differences in values selected between affirmed and nonaffirmed participants, χ²(11) = 7.77, p = .73. Thus, which value participants wrote about did not differ depending on the self-affirmation manipulation.

Willingness to “share.”

We conducted a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA on willingness to share the KID materials. The analysis revealed a significant main effect of identification, F(1, 200) = 5.11, p = .025, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .03, and a nonsignificant main effect of self-affirmation, F(1, 200) = 1.61, p = .206, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01, which were qualified by a significant interaction effect, F(1, 200) = 4.15, p = .043, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .02 (see Figure 1). Participants who did not have children (low-identifiers) were more likely to share the materials when they were affirmed (M = 4.28, SD = 1.73) than when they were not (M = 3.38, SD = 2.17), t(200) = 2.43, p = .016, d = 0.45. By contrast, self-affirmation did not increase willingness to share the KID materials for those with children, M_yes = 4.34, SD_yes = 1.80, M_no = 4.55, SD_no = 1.97, t(200) = 0.53, p = .60, d = 0.11. These findings are consistent with our prediction that the effect of self-affirmation will be stronger among low-identifiers.

Figure 1.

The effect of self-affirmation and victim identification on willingness to share charity materials on Facebook in Study 1.

Discussion

In this study, we examined the role of self-affirmation in individuals’ willingness to share information about others’ hardships in their social networks. Our finding that self-affirmation was more likely to change willingness to share information about others’ misfortunes among low-identifiers supports our assertion that these participants are more likely to engage in ego-defensive processing of others’ misfortunes. As the pretest reported above suggests, these low-identifiers did not differ from high-identifiers in their belief that attending to and helping with the parents’ suffering were moral acts, but they were less willing to help than high-identifier participants. These findings suggest that the discrepancy between knowing the right thing to do and yet not wanting to do it led the low-identifiers to downplay the suffering of the parents, freeing them from the obligation to help. Self-affirmation, however, appeared to disrupt this process, allowing low-identifiers to acknowledge the suffering of others.

At first glance, the moderator of identification with victims might appear at odds with prior findings that coffee drinkers were more likely than coffee nondrinkers to ego-defensively counterargue messages about the negative health effects of coffee consumption (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000). Specifically, if coffee drinkers are considered to have higher identification with coffee consumption than nondrinkers, this finding might appear to be in opposition to our predictions. However, our predictions are fully aligned with the mechanism documented by the previous finding that the self-affirmation effect is stronger when the situation imposes a greater threat to self-integrity (Klein & Harris, 2009; D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000). In the previous finding, a message linking coffee to cancer poses a greater threat to self-integrity for coffee drinkers than nondrinkers because the former’s behavior (i.e., drinking coffee) conflicts with a desire to maintain a positive sense of self (i.e., as someone who makes sensible consumption decisions). Therefore, in this context, coffee drinkers are more motivated to avoid the given message and to display greater ego-defensiveness.

In contrast, in our context, there is no preceding attitude or behavior that conflicts with a desire to maintain self-integrity. For example, we did not investigate a situation in which participants engaged in behavior that might harm their children. Thus, in our context, information about KID itself did not pose a threat to the self-integrity of participants with children. Rather, the threat to self-integrity comes from the tendency to ignore others’ suffering. As participants without children are more likely to disregard the given information, they are also more likely to show the ego-defensive tendency to downplay others’ suffering to justify their ignorance. In the next study, we measured individuals’ attention to information about others’ misfortunes to provide evidence of ego-defensive processing of others’ misfortunes.

Study 2

Study 2 was intended to replicate and extend the findings of Study 1 in the context of actual donation behavior. In addition, we provided evidence for ego-defensive processing by measuring attention to information about others’ misfortunes. Specifically, we measured how much time participants spent reading information about others’ suffering. We predicted that self-affirmation would increase how much time participants spent reading the charity materials as well as how much they donated to the cause, particularly among low-identifiers. We provided participants with materials about a real nongovernment organization that publicizes issues related to breast cancer. Female participants were considered high-identifiers, whereas male participants were low-identifiers.

Participants and Design

We aimed to recruit about 40 participants per condition based on the a priori power analysis in Study 1. During the experiment session, we recruited 188 undergraduate students at a large university in Hong Kong. Four participants were excluded due to the following reasons: two participants failed to follow instructions, and the research assistant made an error with two participants. One hundred eighty-four participants provided complete datasets (101 women, M age = 20.26).² We employed a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects design.

Procedure

All participants were told that they would receive a fixed amount of money, a HK$2 coin (about US$0.26), for each computer screen page of the survey they completed. The survey consisted of five computer screen pages, so participants were given five coins. All participants completed all five pages of the survey. Participants first engaged in the same self-affirmation task as in the previous studies; then, for an ostensibly unrelated study, they were given materials about a nongovernment organization.

Donation to the charity and other measures

Participants read materials about a charity on a computer screen. The charity “Are You Dense” educates the public about the risks and screening challenges of dense breast tissue and its impact on missed or delayed diagnoses of breast cancer. The materials included stories, taken directly from the Are You Dense website, about women whose breast cancer diagnoses were delayed because the women were not properly informed about their breast density. The amount of time participants spent reading the materials was recorded. Then, participants were told that if they wanted to donate money to the charity, they could anonymously place the money in an envelope on the desk and then drop the envelope in a collection box. The amount of money donated to the charity served as our main dependent variable.

Results

Donation amount

The amounts of money donated were not positively skewed (skewness = 0.076, SE = 0.179), so we analyzed the actual amount of money donated to the charity without log-transforming it. A 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA on the donation amounts revealed a marginally significant interaction, F(1, 180) = 3.79, p = .053, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .02, and nonsignificant main effects of self-affirmation, F(1, 180) = 2.31, p = .130, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01, and identification, F(1, 180) = 1.10, p = .296, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01 (see Figure 2). Self-affirmed male participants (M = HK$6.75, SD = 5.53) donated more money than nonaffirmed male participants (M = HK$4.29, SD = 4.71), t(180) = 2.34, p = .020, d = 0.48. However, self-affirmation did not change the donation amount for female participants (M_no = HK$6.42, SD_no = 4.38, M_yes = HK$6.11, SD_yes = 4.61), t(180) = 0.32, p = .751, d = 0.07. The results replicate findings in the previous studies that self-affirmation can increase helping among low-identifiers but not among high-identifiers.

Figure 2.

The effect of self-affirmation and victim identification on donation amount in Study 2.

Time spent reading the charity materials

We had predicted that nonaffirmed male participants’ ego-defensive processing of the charity materials would be reflected in the time they spent reading the materials. Specifically, we predicted that nonaffirmed male participants would spend less time reading the materials compared with affirmed male participants. As female participants are likely to be already concerned about the female victims, we expected that their attention to the materials would be less affected by self-affirmation.

A 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA on time spent reading the charity materials revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 180) = 5.18, p = .024, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .03, and nonsignificant main effects of self-affirmation, F(1, 180) = 0.58, p = .449, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .003, and identification, F(1, 180) = 1.32, p = .251, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01. Consistent with our prediction, self-affirmed male participants (M = 64.63 s, SD = 36.17) spent more time reading the charity materials than nonaffirmed male participants (M = 50.00 s, SD = 29.61), t(180) = 2.05, p = .042, d = 0.44. However, self-affirmation did not change how much time female participants’ spent reading the charity materials (M_no = 66.52 s, SD_no = 32.29, M_yes = 59.20 s, SD_yes = 31.92), t(180) = 1.13, p = .260, d = 0.23.

Mediation analysis

A bootstrap analysis using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013, Model 8 with 5,000 samples) showed that when time spent reading the charity information was examined as the mediating factor for the interactive effect between self-affirmation and identification on donation, the 95% bias-corrected confidence interval (CI) excluded zero (indirect effect = 0.053, SE = 0.04, CI = [0.002, 0.167]; see Figure 3). Therefore, time spent reading the charity information mediated the interaction effect between self-affirmation and identification on donation.

Figure 3.

The mediation analysis in Study 2.

Discussion

Study 2 showed that self-affirmation increased participants’ real donation of money to help victims of misfortune among low-identifiers but not among high-identifiers. Moreover, low-identifiers spent less time reading about others’ suffering when they were not affirmed, supporting our assertion that these low-identifiers are initially motivated to look away from others’ pain. However, this latter finding, although consistent with our ego-defensive processing account, might be the result of other factors such as levels of empathy or compassion. Thus, in the next study, we provide more direct evidence for ego-defensive processing of others’ misfortunes by measuring the construal of others’ misfortunes.

Similar to Study 1, it should be noted that the charity materials did not suggest that women might be engaging in behavior that can increase the risk of breast cancer. The victims in the charity materials were innocent victims who were not informed about the density of their breast tissue. Therefore, female participants who read the victims’ stories did not need to ego-defensively process the charity materials to deny the fact that they were engaging in behaviors that went against their self-integrity. Instead, female participants were already able to easily relate to the victims, so they showed concern toward the female victims regardless of whether they were self-affirmed or not. By contrast, the male participants, who did not identify as readily with the victims and thus were more motivated to discount the pain of the victims, were driven to action by self-affirmation.

Study 3

In this study, we measured participants’ construal of others’ misfortunes to test whether self-affirmation would make participants less likely to ego-defensively construe others’ misfortunes as commonplace hardships. We conducted the study at a large university and provided student participants with materials about a program to help business school students in need. Students majoring in business were considered high-identification participants, whereas students majoring in other subjects were low-identification participants. We predicted that self-affirmation would make participants less likely to downplay the hardships of the business school students in need and enhance their intention to help those students, particularly among low-identifiers.

Participants and Design

We aimed to recruit about 40 participants per condition, as in the previous studies. During the experiment session, we were able to recruit 153 undergraduate students at a large university in Hong Kong. Each participant was paid HK$20.0 (about US$2.5). Two participants who failed to follow instructions were excluded. One hundred fifty-one remaining participants provided complete datasets (111 women, M age = 20.44, 68 business majors).³ We employed a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects design.

Procedure

Participants first engaged in the same self-affirmation task as in Studies 1 and 2; then, they were given materials about the Two Meals a Day program.

Coupon donation intention

Participants read information about the Two Meals a Day program on a computer screen. They were told that the School of Business is considering developing a program to help business-major students in need by providing them with two meal coupons per day to use at any on-campus cafeteria. The program materials included stories of business students having difficulty paying their tuition and living expenses. After reading the program materials, participants indicated how many coupons they were willing to buy for these needy business school students, which served as our main dependent variable.

Construal of others’ misfortunes and other measures

Participants also indicated how they construed the hardships of the students mentioned in the program materials with three items measured on 7-point semantic differential scales (e.g., “very unusual and worthy of attention/a rather commonplace example of the difficulties presented by life” and “extremely unfortunate/not an ‘end of the world’ situation”; α = .80).

Results

Coupon donation intention

The number of coupons participants were willing to donate was positively skewed (skewness = 1.90, SE = 0.20), so we log-transformed the variable.⁴ For ease of interpretation, we reported the number of coupons but used the log-transformed number of coupons in the analyses. A 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of self-affirmation, F(1, 144) = 6.12, p = .015, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .04, and a marginally significant main effect of victim identification, F(1, 144) = 2.88, p = .092, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .02, which were qualified by a significant interaction, F(1, 144) = 5.54, p = .020, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .04 (see Figure 4). Nonbusiness students were willing to donate a greater number of meal coupons when they were self-affirmed (M = 4.14, SD = 4.26) versus when they were not (M = 1.28, SD = 1.64), t(144) = 3.59, p < .001, d = 0.82, whereas self-affirmation did not change how many coupons business students were willing to donate (M_no = 3.67, SD_no = 4.03, M_yes = 3.50, SD_yes = 4.67), t(144) = 0.08, p = .935, d = 0.01. The findings support our hypothesis that self-affirmation can increase helping among individuals who are less likely to identify with the victims.

Figure 4.

The effect of self-affirmation and victim identification on the number of meal coupons participants were willing to donate in Study 3.

Because we relied on the count data (i.e., the number of coupons) that was overdispersed (χ² = 223.54, p < .001), we also conducted a negative binomial regression to check the robustness of our analyses. The analysis revealed a significant main effect of self-affirmation, b = .28, SE = 0.10, z = 2.82, p = .005, and victim identification, b = .22, SE = 0.10, z = 2.21, p = .027, which were qualified by a significant interaction, b = −.30, SE = 0.10, z = −3.05, p = .002. Self-affirmation significantly increased the number of coupons nonbusiness students were willing to donate, b = .59, SE = 0.14, z = 4.15, p < .001, whereas the self-affirmation effect was not significant among business students, b = −.02, SE = 0.14, z = −0.16, p = .869. The results were consistent with the analyses with the log-transformed number of coupons. Therefore, our results are robust to model selection.

Construal of others’ misfortunes

A 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of self-affirmation, F(1, 144) = 4.08, p = .045, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .03, and victim identification, F(1, 144) = 6.60, p = .011, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .04, and a marginally significant interaction, F(1, 144) = 3.67, p = .057, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .03. Nonbusiness student participants were more likely to construe the hardships of students in need of money as commonplace problems when they were not self-affirmed (M = 5.32, SD = 1.07) than when they were (M = 4.51, SD = 1.23), t(144) = 2.92, p = .004, d = 0.70, whereas this construal did not differ according to self-affirmation among business students (M_no = 4.39, SD_no = 1.52, M_yes = 4.37, SD_yes = 1.20), t(144) = 0.07, p = .945, d = 0.01. The findings support our theorization that self-affirmation reduces ego-defensive downplaying of others’ misfortunes among individuals who are less likely to identify with those others in need.

Mediation analyses

A bootstrap analysis using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013, Model 8 with 5,000 samples; see Figure 5) showed that when the construal of others’ misfortunes was examined as the mediating factor for the interactive effect of self-affirmation and identification on the number of coupons donated, the 95% bias-corrected CI excluded zero (indirect effect = −0.11, SE = 0.06, 95% CI = [−0.24, −0.001]). Therefore, the construal of others’ misfortunes mediated the interaction effect between self-affirmation and identification on the number of meal coupons participants were willing to donate.

Figure 5.

The mediation analysis in Study 3.

Discussion

Study 3 replicated the findings in Studies 1 and 2 that self-affirmation enhanced helping intention and behavior among low-identifiers but not among high-identifiers. Study 3 also provided further evidence for the mechanism of the self-affirmation effect. Our findings indicated that self-affirmation changed low-identifiers’ construal of others’ suffering, making them less likely to construe others’ misfortunes as ordinary and mundane and more likely to see them as unusual and worthy of attention.

According to our account based on ego-defensive processing, self-affirmation enhanced helping intention by reducing participants’ inclination to downplay others’ misfortunes. However, self-affirmation among the low-identifiers might have enhanced helping intention by increasing general other-directed emotions (Crocker et al., 2008; Sherman, 2013). This other-directed emotion account hinges on the premise that nonaffirmed low-identifiers initially do not care about the misfortunes of distant others, while self-affirmation makes them care more about those others. In support of our account over this alternative, we note that the other-directed emotion account does not predict the changes in the construal of others’ suffering that we observed in our process measure for Study 3. The other-directed account suggests that self-affirmation increases helping behavior because it makes people care more about others in need, not because it makes others’ suffering look more severe. That is, according to the other-directed emotion account, low- and high-identifiers do not necessarily differ in terms of how they construe others’ misfortunes; rather, low-identifiers simply do not care about such misfortunes. Hence, this account does not explain the differences in responses among low-identifiers (but not high-identifiers) to the question of whether the hardships were to be construed as ordinary versus extremely unfortunate.

Furthermore, we would argue that the other-directed emotion account also implies that low-identifiers, who are assumed to be less likely to care about others in need than high-identifiers, would also be less likely to endorse the moral value of helping these others. It therefore follows that, if self-affirmation increases other-directed emotions, affirmed individuals would also be more likely than nonaffirmed individuals to endorse the moral value of helping others. To assess this, we conducted a follow-up study with the same population of Study 3 (N = 158, 104 women, M age = 20.19, 78 business majors) to check whether victim identification or self-affirmation changed individuals’ endorsement of the moral value of helping others in need.⁵ We used similar items as in the pretest of Study 1 to measure participants’ endorsement of the moral value (e.g., “Ignoring these students’ needs is”: 1 = immoral, 7 = moral; α = .83). In contrast to the other-directed emotion account, a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (identification with the victims: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA showed that neither the main effects of victim identification, F(1, 154) = 1.15, p = .286, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01, and self-affirmation, F(1, 154) = 0.96, p = .330, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .01, nor their interaction, F(1, 154) = 0.00, p = .983, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .00, was significant. In the next study, we further tested the mechanism of the self-affirmation effect to rule out the other-directed emotion account by manipulating the importance of the target charity issue.

Study 4

In Study 4, we used the same charitable campaign as in Study 3. However, in this study, we only employed low-identifiers (i.e., nonbusiness students), and we manipulated the importance of the charity issue (i.e., helping business students in need) to rule out an alternative explanation that self-affirmation among the low-identifiers might enhance helping by increasing general other-directed emotions (Crocker et al., 2008). According to this alternative explanation, nonaffirmed nonbusiness students might not have wanted to help business students in need because they perceived it as unfair that the program was available only to business students. However, self-affirmation could reduce such reactance by increasing general other-directed emotions.

The manipulation of importance of the charity in the new study was intended to showcase the different conditions under which ego-defensive processing versus reactance toward the program (other-directed emotions) would most likely be influenced by self-affirmation. The high importance condition was designed to evoke high ego-defensive processing but low reactance toward the program. When the charity was announced as important to the university because “statistics show that household income is the lowest and failure rates of paying tuition and student loans were highest at the School of Business among all departments at the university,” we expected that nonbusiness students would feel threatened when they did not want to help business students but they would not feel reactance toward a program that appears to have a reasonable rationale for its existence. In contrast, the low importance condition was designed to evoke low ego-defensive processing but high reactance. When the charity is not deemed a priority by the university, we expected it would not trigger ego-defensive processing among those who would like not to help because failing to help with a low-priority issue does not imply something negative about the self. However, it could trigger reactance (e.g., “being asked to support a program designed to help people whose issue is not a priority for the university is unfair”). Hence, if ego-defensive processing is the driving force for our findings, we should see the effect of self-affirmation in the high importance condition; conversely, if other-directed emotion is the driving force, we should see the effect of self-affirmation in the low importance condition.

Participants and Design

During the experiment session, we recruited 190 non-business-major undergraduate students at a large university in Hong Kong.⁶ Each participant was paid HK$20.0. Six participants who failed to follow instructions were excluded, for a final sample of 184 (121 women, M age = 20.08). We employed a 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (issue importance: high vs. low) between-subjects design.

Procedure

Participants first engaged in the self-affirmation task, as in the previous studies, and then engaged in two ostensibly unrelated tasks, one manipulating the importance of the charity issue and the other measuring participants’ helping intention.

Importance of the charity issue

Participants were told that the university newsletter committee wanted feedback from students on a piece about priorities in 2016 at their university. The piece identified two high-priority issues and two low-priority issues. In the high importance condition, helping business-major students in need was one of the high-priority issues, whereas in the low importance condition it was one of the low-priority issues. After reading the piece, participants answered a few questions regarding the piece, including the manipulation check of issue importance (“Which of the following two issues was considered important [high-priority issue]?” and “Which of the following two issues was considered less important [low-priority issue]?”) and control variables related to the piece (“The content is easy to understand,” “The piece is structured well,” and “The length of the piece is reasonable”: 1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). All participants correctly answered the importance manipulation check question, and the control variables did not differ depending on the condition, all ps > .25.

Coupon donation intention

Next, participants read information about the same Two Meals a Day program as in Study 2 and indicated how many coupons they were willing to buy for needy business school students.

Results

Coupon donation intention

As in Study 3, we used the log-transformed number of coupons participants were willing to donate (skewness = 4.88, SE = 0.18). A 2 (self-affirmation: yes vs. no) × 2 (issue importance: high vs. low) between-subjects ANOVA revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 180) = 4.18, p = .042, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .02, and nonsignificant main effects of self-affirmation, F(1, 180) = 0.77, p = .382, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .004, and importance, F(1, 180) = 0.24, p = .625, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .001 (see Figure 6). Supporting the ego-defensiveness account, but not the other-directed emotion account, self-affirmation was effective in increasing the number of coupons donated in the high importance condition (M_no = 2.72, SD_no = 4.13, M_yes = 6.70, SD_yes = 13.02), t(180) = 2.07, p = .040, d = 0.39, but not in the low importance condition (M_no = 3.13, SD_no = 3.42, M_yes = 2.43, SD_yes = 3.47), t(180) = 0.83, p = .410, d = 0.20.

Figure 6.

The effect of self-affirmation and issue importance on the number of meal coupons participants were willing to donate in Study 4.

As in Study 2, we also conducted a negative binomial regression. We found a significant main effect of importance, b = .22, SE = 0.10, z = 2.18, p = .030, a nonsignificant main effect of self-affirmation, b = .16, SE = 0.10, z = 1.61, p = .108, and a significant interaction, b = .29, SE = 0.10, z = 2.89, p = .004. In the high importance condition, self-affirmation significantly increased the number of coupons participants were willing to donate, b = .45, SE = 0.16, z = 2.83, p = .005, whereas the self-affirmation effect was not significant in the low importance condition, b = −.13, SE = 0.12, z = −1.07, p = .284. Thus, the results were consistent with the analyses with the log-transformed number of coupons.

Discussion

Study 4 examined the importance of the charity issue as a moderator to rule out the alternative explanation that self-affirmation can enhance helping among low-identifiers by increasing empathy and other-directed emotions (Crocker et al., 2008). According to this explanation, self-affirmation can make people care about things they previously did not care about as it leads to self-transcendence. If this account were to hold, self-affirmation should be more effective in enhancing support for the charity issue that would have been otherwise disregarded as unimportant, because in this case, self-affirmation has more room to enhance self-transcendence. However, our data showed the opposite. Supporting the ego-defensiveness account, self-affirmation was not effective in increasing helping intention when participants were told the charity issue was unimportant.

General Discussion

In the current research, we tested the role of self-affirmation as a means to reduce ego-defensive downplaying of others’ misfortunes and thereby enhance helping behavior toward others in need. Our investigation followed from research showing that awareness of others’ misfortunes can cause discomfort (Batson et al., 1997, 1983). We therefore reasoned that individuals are often motivated to ignore information about others’ pain and thus not to help. However, ignoring others’ suffering threatens self-integrity by suggesting that one is not a good and caring person. To get out of this bind, people might downplay others’ misfortunes—for example, by characterizing them as relatively minor or, where undeniably substantial, as unfortunate but nevertheless commonplace troubles that do not require a call to action. Across four studies, we show that self-affirmation intervenes in this process, thereby increasing helping behavior toward others in need.

In Study 1, self-affirmation increased individuals’ willingness to spread information about others’ unfortunate stories on their Facebook pages, and this self-affirmation effect was significant only when individuals were less likely to identify with the victims. In Study 2, we found that self-affirmation increased the amount of time participants spent reading the charity materials and how much they donated to the cause, but only among low-identification participants. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 that self-affirmation enhanced individuals’ intention to help others, but only among low-identifiers, and also provided evidence for the mechanism that self-affirmation can reduce ego-defensive downplaying of others’ misfortunes. Specifically, self-affirmation made participants less likely to construe others’ misfortunes as ordinary hardships. Study 4 further tested this mechanism by manipulating the importance of the charity issue. The result shows that self-affirmation increased helping intention only when the charity issue was considered important. This finding also rules out an alternative explanation that self-affirmation can increase helping by enhancing other-directed emotions.

The present research contributes to the literature on self-affirmation by exploring the mechanism by which it can influence prosocial behavior. Previous research on self-affirmation has focused mainly on cognitive effects of self-affirmation on message persuasion. Self-affirmation has been found to shift individuals’ information processing, such that affirmed individuals exhibit a more engaging, structured way of thinking (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000; D. K. Sherman & Cohen, 2002, 2006; Wakslak & Trope, 2009). In addition, most of these studies have focused on changes in responses toward the self. Although a few recent articles have examined the link between self-affirmation and prosocial behavior (Lindsay & Creswell, 2014; Thomaes et al., 2012), the current research broadens our understanding of the self-affirmation effect on prosocial behavior by examining two related yet different mechanisms of self-affirmation that have been identified in prior work: an ego-defensive account (D. A. K. Sherman et al., 2000) and an other-directed emotion account (Crocker et al., 2008).

The current research also contributes to the charitable giving literature and provides important implications for the implementation of charity appeals. Charity organizations do their best to inform potential donors about the misfortunes of people in need, often assuming that as long as individuals are well-informed about others’ misfortunes, they will help if they have the means. Our findings indicate that, although knowledge that people are in need is necessary to initiate helping (i.e., people can help others only when they are aware of the need), it may not be sufficient to produce actual helping behaviors, and appeals that play up the magnitude of the need could even backfire. The “catch” is that potential donors might be motivated to turn a blind eye to the distressing information, particularly if they do not relate to the victims. The current research suggests that self-affirmation can help to “turn off” this disregard.

Regarding victim identification, one might argue that there could be confounding effects associated with measured victim identification. However, the current study presented various distinct instances of victim identification that provide important practical implications for charities as they are readily identifiable. For instance, we included people without children, males, and nonbusiness majors as low-identifiers who showed a significant self-affirmation effect in increasing helping intention and behavior. As there is little commonality among these instances, it is hard to imagine a factor associated with all these distinct groups that would make them sensitive to self-affirmation.

Another point to note is that the reported self-affirmation effect is not driven by cognitive dissonance. In Studies 1, 3, and 4, in which we did not measure actual donation, participants might have felt dissonance due to the fact that they were not able to do anything concrete to help those in need, and self-affirmation might have reduced this dissonance. However, we believe it is unlikely that participants felt such cognitive dissonance because they were always informed that they could actually help the victims. For example, in Study 1, we used a real charity foundation, KID, and participants were informed about KID’s actual Facebook page. In Studies 3 and 4, we used a Two Meals a Day Program, and participants were informed that the school of business is considering launching the program within a month to help students majoring in business. Thus, we believe it is reasonable to assume that participants recognized a real chance to help the people in need.

Although the current research provides evidence to support the ego-defensive account over the other-directed emotion account, it is important to recognize some limitations of the studies to provide guidelines for fruitful future research. First, we had argued that the pretest of Study 1 and the follow-up study to Study 3 support our ego-defensive account, but not the other-directed emotion account because neither victim identification nor self-affirmation changed participants’ endorsement of the moral value of helping others in need. However, we might have observed such effects because people generally tend to endorse the moral value of helping others, so there may have been little room for victim identification and self-affirmation to further enhance the endorsement of the moral value. Second, in Study 3, we suggested that the other-directed account does not necessarily require self-affirmation to induce differences in the construal of others’ misfortunes as the ego-defensive account does because the other-directed account suggests that self-affirmation increases helping behavior by making people care more about others in need, not necessarily by making others’ suffering look more severe. However, it may be possible that the other-directed emotion account would also predict that self-affirmed low-identifiers might view others’ suffering as more severe as they come to care more about this suffering. Third, in Study 4, it might be possible that self-affirmation did not enhance helping in the low importance condition because participants wanted to focus their other-directed energy enhanced by self-affirmation more on helping people whose causes matter. Thus, measuring participants’ intention to help others cope with unimportant issues might not have fully captured changes in participants’ other-directedness by self-affirmation.

To address the aforementioned issues, future research could employ other ways to examine the other-directed emotion account. For example, future research might directly measure other-directed emotions, for example, through participants’ self-reported emotions or by using electroencephalogram (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure participants’ physiological states. Future research could also examine a moderating role of people’s baseline level of other-directedness. Compared with low empathizers, high empathizers have a higher baseline level of other-directedness (Davis, 1983; Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). Hence, high empathizers might already care enough about others’ misfortunes. Thus, according to the other-directed emotion account, self-affirmation has a greater room to enhance people’s other-directedness among low empathizers whose baseline of other-directedness is relatively low. However, according to the ego-defensive account, it is not clear whether high or low empathizers will feel greater need to ego-defensively downplay others’ suffering. On one hand, high empathizers might feel greater need to ego-defensively downplay others’ suffering because they can more easily feel others’ pain and feeling others’ pain can cause discomfort. On the other hand, high empathizers might be able to internalize others’ suffering as their own and thus less likely to ego-defensively turn a blind eye to others’ suffering and more likely to act on what they feel. Future research can explore the issue.

Future work may further examine the role of discomfort generated by others’ suffering. Our premise is that people may engage in ego-defensive downplaying of others’ pain when the awareness of such pain causes discomfort. The current research, therefore, focuses on relatively intense suffering of others, including harm to children, financial crisis, and cancer. If self-affirmation is effective in increasing helping because it makes people less likely to turn a blind eye to avoid the discomfort of knowing others’ pain, this effect should be weaker when the pain is mild. Another interesting avenue for future research is to develop self-affirmation manipulations that can be embedded in charity materials so as to enhance helping. Most previous literature on self-affirmation used the same essay-writing task we used, but discovering various ways to either manipulate or measure self-affirmation will be helpful in providing more practical as well as theoretical implications.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) Research Grants Council (HKU 799813) awarded to the first author.

Notes

Supplemental Material

Supplementary material is available online with this article.

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