When telling the world what you want to achieve can be counterproductive

WHEN TELLING THE WORLD WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE CAN BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE YU-CHEN HUNG NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2013     WHEN TELLING THE WORLD WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE CAN BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE YU-CHEN HUNG (B.B.A International Business & B.S Psychology, National Taiwan University) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF MARKETING BUSINESS SCHOOL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2013     DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously _ Yu-chen Hung 11 Oct 2013   i ACKNOWLEGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors, Associate Professors Catherine Yeung and Xiuping Li, for their suppport, encouragment and guidance throughout my doctoral study at the National University of Singapore I have been inspired by their dedication to scholary pursuit, and their valuable feedbacks have shaped the thesis for better I am indebted to the participants in the brownbag at the NUS for their thoughtful suggestions, and I wish to thank the examiners for their insightful comments I would also like to thank my fellow PhD students for their warm support and companionship Special thanks go to Masia Jiang, Sun Li, Tanmay Satpthy, Song Liang, Wei Jie, Wang Yue, Xiu Weiwei, and Zhang Xing My appreciation also goes to my special friends, Mohammed Hosseini and Katlin Liu I also wish to express my deepest appreciation to my family for their support during my pursuit of this PhD   ii TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMARY v  LIST OF TABLES vi  LIST OF FIGURES vii   CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1  1.1 RESEARCH MOTIVATION FOR THE IMPACT OF GOAL PUBLICITY ON BEHAVIOR 1  1.2 RESEARCH FRAMEWORK AND CONTRIBUTION 3  CHAPTER LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT 4  2.1 PAST RESEARCH ON THE EFFECT OF GOAL PUBLICITY 4  2.1.1 The Facilitative Effect of Goal Publicity 4  2.1.2 The Counterproductive Effect of Goal Publicity 6  2.1.3 Factors that Might Drive the Diverging Effects of Goal Publicity 8  2.2 GOAL-SYSTEMS THEORY AND THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN A GOAL AND THE IDEAL SELF 9  2.2.1 Possible Association between Self-Concepts and Goals 11  2.3 SELF-EXPRESSION ORIENTATION 13   2.4 MAIN HYPOTHESIS AND EXPERIMENT OVERVIEW 15  CHAPTER EXPERIMENTS 18  3.1 EXPERIMENT 18  3.1.1 Overview 18  3.1.2 Design and Procedure 19  3.1.3 Results and Discussion 21  3.2 EXPERIMENT 22  3.2.1 Overview 22  3.2.2 Design and Procedure 23  3.2.3 Results and Discussion 24  3.3 EXPERIMENT 26    iii 3.3.1 Overview 26  3.3.2 Design and Procedure 26  3.3.3 Results 28  3.3.3.1 Confound Check 28  3.3.3.2 Time Spent on Reading Goal-Relevant Information 28  3.3.3.3 Mediating Role of Perceived Goal Progress on Reading Time 29  3.3.3.4 Number of Correct Answers 30  3.3.4 Discussion 31  3.4 EXPERIMENT 33  3.4.1 Overview 33  3.4.2 Results and Discussion 33  3.5 EXPERIMENT 35  3.5.1 Overview 35  3.5.2 Design and Procedure 35  3.5.3 Results 37  3.5.4 Discussion 38  CHAPTER GENERAL DISCUSSION 40  4.1 SUMMARY 40  4.2 CONTRIBUTION 42 4.3 LIMITATION 44 4.4 FUTURE RESEARCH 45  REFERENCES 47  APPENDICES 52    iv SUMMARY While most research has documented that publicizing a desirable goal facilitates goal-consistent behavior, some research has shown that it may impede enactment I propose that goal publicity backfires when individuals are oriented toward expressing self-concepts associated with a goal Individuals with a focus on self-expression perceive goal publicity as the revelation of their positive attributes to other people Publicity induces a sense of progress toward obtaining desirable attributes and reduces subsequent goal enactment This proposition is tested in five experiments, using common goals, such as being “academically excellent” or “environmentally responsible,” and different methods to publicize those goals (e.g., revealing one’s goal to another person incidentally or signing a petition letter) These experiments demonstrated that individuals who focused on self-expression became less motivated to engage in goal-consistent behavior following goal publicity because publicity fulfilled their need to substantiate a positive self-concept This thesis consists of four chapters Chapter discusses the research question and outlines the research framework Chapter reviews the diverging effects of goal publicity and develops the moderating role of expressiveness orientation Chapter presents the five experiments that tested the hypothesis Specifically, Experiment demonstrated that those who publicized an environmental goal behaved less environmentally friendly Experiment and showed that, when self-expression orientation was high (vs low), goal publicity entailed a sense of goal progress and decreased goal-consistent behavior Experiment established that the backfiring effect depended on self-expression orientation rather than the overtness of self-concepts Experiment generalized the backfiring effect to a setting where individuals’ signatures for goal support were in public display Finally, Chapter concludes the findings in support of the proposition and discusses future studies that could extend this framework to include self-expressive acts other than goal publicity   v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Willingness to Volunteer in Experiment 38  Table 2: Summary of Results (Experiments 1–5)—Dependent Measures 41    vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: A Goal System Consists of Mentally Represented Networks Wherein Goals Are Associated with Means: An Example of a Weight-Loss Goal 10   Figure 2: A Behavior Goal’s Association with a Self-Concept: An Example of Losing Weight and the Self-Concept of Being Self-Disciplined 12   Figure 3: The Hypothesized Contingency Based on Self-Expression Orientation  16   Figure 4: Mediation by the Sense of Goal Progress in the High Expressive Condition 30   vii     CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 RESEARCH MOTIVATION FOR THE IMPACT OF GOAL PUBLICITY ON BEHAVIOR Goal publicity refers to the state where one’s goal is known to another person, a group of people, or the public Publicity is often used as a strategic means to promote desirable behavior by organizations For example, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) encourages supporters to display their commitment to environmental protection by wearing and displaying logoed products, such as watches, clothes, and cups (see Appendix A); public transportation companies invite commuters to wear badges that highlight the ecological benefits of taking public transportation (see Appendix B) Health programs encourage participants to take health pledges or use symbolic items, such as a bracelet engraved with a weight-loss target, to communicate to others that they have endorsed and adopted the goal (see Appendix C) PepsiCo also demonstrated this strategy when they invited fans to share their commitment to recycle used bottles with their friends on social media (see Appendix D) Goal publicity is adopted as part of these marketing campaigns with the objective to encourage consistent behavior, and the prevalence of such campaigns reflects the belief that public knowledge of one’s goal facilitates consistent behavior and helps one to achieve his/her own goals However, does the target audience of these marketing campaigns also believe that goal publicity can facilitate goal achievement? In a survey, I asked 109 participants whether they thought sharing a goal with others would facilitate, inhibit, or have no effect on their goal achievements The majority (77 percent) of the participants believed that sharing their goals could help personal goal achievement Thus, conceivably, they will embrace campaigns involving goal publicity or goal pledge if they adopt the goal personally       Table 2: Summary of Results (Experiments 1–5)—Dependent Measures High expressive orientation Goal Not publicized publicized Low expressive orientation Goal Not publicized publicized Experiment 1: acting environmentally responsibly (n = 105) (Goal-inconsistent behavior) Average times of (a) throwing away recyclable items and (b) using a one-time take away box 2.09 (2.01) publicity: voluntary 3.50 (3.16) publicity: non-voluntary 3.17 (2.33) 2.05 (1.44) - - Experiment 2: being academically successful (n = 105) Study time (hours) 7.44 (4.76) 9.90 (5.01) 9.91 (5.16) 7.75 (5.12) 106.25 (30.17) 12.23 (2.40) 93.44 (26.41) 11.50 (2.14) 5.41 (1.88) 5.73 (1.67) 6.45 (1.86) 3.00 (2.24) 2.72 (1.69) 3.75 (2.22) 34.84 (20.29) 42.23 (17.54) 26.90 (18.48) Experiment 3: being environmentally responsible (n = 86) Reading time (seconds) 86.69 (25.79) 113.51 (50.50) 11.96 (2.71) Task performance 10.10 (3.05) Sense of goal progress 7.07 (1.28) Experiment 4: recycling (n = 88) (Goal-inconsistent behavior) Number of thrown-away 4.70 (3.28) recyclable items Experiment 5: supporting pro-social activities (n = 80) Willingness to volunteer 22.50 (20.62) Although the counterproductive effect of goal publicity emerged under the high expressive orientation condition, the facilitative effect of goal publicity was not always statistically reliable in the low expressive condition across studies (the pattern was directionally consistent with the effect) There are several possible explanations for this First, a number of factors that contribute to the facilitative effect have been controlled in the experimental setting For example, after goal publicity, there was no interaction between the experimenter and participants, the motivation to appear consistent might therefore be low Second, in prior research,   41      the facilitative effect might be driven by both the act of publicity and the higher level of goal elaboration accompanying the publicity act For example, Burn and Oskamp (1986) compared a condition where participants signed a petition in front of an experimenter with a baseline condition where participants neither signed nor read anything (see also Taylor and Booth-Butterfield 1993) The facilitative effect might be explained by the increased level of goal elaboration when reading the petition letter, rather than goal publicity alone However, in this current study, participants elaborated on the target goal regardless of whether they publicized the goal later or not Goal elaboration in itself, independent of the act of goal publicity, might have increased the baseline motivation to engage in goalconsistent behavior Hence, the act of publicity alone may not bring about a strong facilitative effect that reaches statistical significance It is important to distinguish the counterproductive effect due to goal publicity from the well-documented licensing effect (Khan and Dhar 2006) Research on the licensing effect has shown that a prior choice can activate and satisfy positive self-concepts and provide a license for a more self-indulgent option However, the salience of self-concepts was kept consistent in the publicity versus no-publicity conditions within each expressive condition across the five experiments Goal enactment changes as a function of the goal publicity under the high expressive condition Therefore, the licensing effect does not explain the counterproductive effect brought about by goal publicity The two processes could be orthogonal to each other While the licensing effect occurs regardless of whether others know about one’s behavior, this study clearly demonstrates that the presence of others is essential to introducing the counterproductive effect 4.2 CONTRIBUTION This study has both theoretical contribution and managerial implication Firstly and most importantly, it offers a theoretical framework that helps to explain the diverging effects of goal publicity The findings show that publicizing   42      concrete behavioral goals is also likely to backfire when the situation heightens the self-expression orientation, and there is minimum social pressure for later enactment Managerially, the results call for caution when organizations try to use goal publicity to promote desirable behavior This study suggests that goal publicity may act as a social signal that projects the possession of socially desirable characters, and that it may lower the motivation for enactment when people not feel evaluated with respect to what they publicize A thoughtful campaign design is thus required to avoid triggering the counterproductive effect For example, an emphasis on the non-expressive incentives associated with goal publicity act (e.g., publicizing a goal to be green and enjoy free bus ridership) or highlighting the non-expressive benefits of consistent behavior (e.g., taking bus to save money and reduce ecological footprints) could both attenuate self-expression thoughts that sabotage motivations for goal-consistent behavior Secondly, the research broadens the understanding of how self-concept salience affects subsequent behavior by incorporating the need for self-expression Past research has shown that the activation of a particular aspect of the self makes it more likely that one’s subsequent responses are congruent with that aspect, and the prime-to-behavior is well established for a social identity (e.g., gender) and self-concepts (e.g., extravert) (Kettle and Haubl 2011) For example, acting like an extravert in front of other people attunes to one’s extravert self and leads to more extraverted behavior subsequently (Tice 1992) Priming the African American identity aligns cognitive performance to that of the stereotyped black people (Steele and Aroson 1995) This manipulation of the self-expressive orientation in this research increases the salience of self-concepts, but the satisfaction of the need for self-expression from publicizing a goal disengages consistent behavior A similar disengagement resulting from satisfying selfexpression need is reported in Chernev et al (2011), which shows that listing past engagements in identity-relevant activities reduces identity-relevant consumption This study builds on their findings and further establishes that goal publicity serves as a means of satisfying the need for self-expression   43      Thirdly, the study focuses on socially desirable goals It is likely that achieving socially desirable goals is a potential means to acquire social capital, and so if one accrues social capital by publicizing one’s goal, there is a reduced need to accrue social capital in other dimensions For instance, if a person gains friends as a result of publicizing the goal of animal protection which symbolizes that he is a caring person, his need to further accrue social capital from altruistic deeds is reduced Therefore, the counterproductive effect may serve as a way for individuals to conserve “resource” (effort required to carry out controlled behaviors) while reaching the same level of social capital This study contributes in suggesting that goal publicity may be a resource-conservation strategy when an organism aims to accumulate social capital 4.3 LIMITATION This dissertation has several limitations First, it is limited in terms of differentiating the benefits that one may accrue from goal publicity Publicizing a goal may give rise to benefits other than asserting self-concepts, such as getting information from like-minded people or getting accepted by a group that values the same goal The study focuses on the individual’s needs to establish a positive self-image, and it has yet to account for other types of benefits that publicizers may intend to gain A full picture of the effect of goal publicity will emerge with a thorough consideration of all possible benefits Another limitation is that this study treats behavioral goals as a homogenous category without recognizing possible differences among them Some behavior is more observable than others, and goal progress is evaluable to onlookers (e.g., losing weight) For highly observable and evaluable behavior, accountability concern will stay active and inhibit goal disengagement Conceivably, the counterproductive effect is less likely to occur when the behavior is highly evaluable This study has demonstrated that counterproductive   44      effect occurs when behavioral goals are publicized, but behavioral goals may still differ and the difference constitutes the boundary condition of the counterproductive effect 4.4 FUTURE RESEARCH This study also offers some possible directions for future research First, although it only examines goal publicity as a means of communicating a desirable self-image, the framework can cover similar behavior that serves the same communicative purpose For example, carrying an environmentally friendly bag or wearing a WWF-logoed t-shirt can communicate a person’s socially responsible trait Future research could examine the extent to which such behavior leads to the same backfiring effect observed in the present study The backfiring effect in these consumption domains, conceivably, depends not only on the expressiveness orientation (as shown in the experiments) but also on other factors, such as the visibility and actual usage frequency of such products Future research should also test the role of situational factors in triggering an expressiveness orientation This study experimentally induced such an orientation by instructing participants to elaborate on how the adoption of a certain goal informed others of the kind of people they were In real life situations, situational factors may exert a similar effect on inducing an expressiveness orientation For example, recent research has shown that social media is a platform people commonly use to express the self (Bargh and McKenna 2004) Thus, it is conceivable that the counterproductive effect of goal publicity is particularly apparent when the publicity is carried out on a social media platform If people who are active in social media tend to have a strong chronic expressive orientation, then this group of people may similarly be more susceptible to the counterproductive effect of publicity Future research could address these issues by linking situational and trait variables to the proposed framework   45      Further, individuals can have different self-concepts activated at goal publicity For example, some may associate the goal of becoming a good professor with the self-concept of being ambitious, while others may associate it with being accountable Some self-concepts may be substantiated only when consistent actions take place, and goal publicity may merely serve as a reminder that one has not made enough progress toward the goal The traits of being accountable, reliable, or consistent may be such self-concepts because their substantiation may require one to act on the publicized goal Thus, whether goal publicity backfires may depend on the specific self-concepts associated with a goal at the moment of publicity Future research should specify whether the expression of all self-concepts is equally likely to lead to a counterproductive effect   46      REFERENCES Abrahamse, Wokje, Linda Steg, Charles Vlek, and Talib Rothengatter (2005), "A Review of Intervention Studies Aimed at Household Energy Conservation," Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25 (September), 273–91 Ahluwalia, Rohini, Robert E Burnkrant, and H Rao Unnava (2000), "Consumer Response to Negative Publicity: The Moderating Role of Commitment," Journal of 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Weight-loss participants are encouraged to wear the “Just 10 bracelet” so “when people ask why you wear it, you can tell them the importance of losing just 10 pounds has on your health.” The bracelet is provided at a popular health management website, www.doctoroz.com Appendix D: PepsiCo launched an application that enabled users to share a virtual can and their commitments to recycle with their friends on Facebook This activity aimed to encourage Pepsi drinkers to recycle used bottles and cans   53      Appendix E: A comparison of the experimental procedures used in the research showing a counterproductive effect (the first study in the table) and a facilitative effect (the remaining studies) The differences are denoted as ‘(a)’when a persuasive message was present at the time that publicity took place, ‘(b)’ when participants provided their name or signed a pledge at the time that publicity took place, and ‘(c)’ when someone who had knowledge of one’s goal was present at the time of behavioral enactment/measurement Study Gollwitzer et al (2009) Goal Becoming a lawyer or a psychologist Taylor & BoothButterfield (1993) Safety driving Burn & Oskamp (1986) Household recycling Burger & Guadagno (2003) Help the homeless Nyer & Dellande (2010) A weight-loss target Publicity manipulation Goal commitment was read by an experimenter, but it remained anonymous Participants signed a pledge presented by an experimenter after they read a persuasive message on safe driving (a)(b) Participants signed a pledge presented by three scouts after they read a persuasive message on recycling (a)(b) Participants signed a pledge presented by an experimenter after they read a persuasive message on helping the homeless (a)(b) Participants post their name and weight-loss targets on a bulletin board in a weight management center (b) Behavior measurement Self-reported time spent on goal pursuit (Exp 1) A goal-related activity observable to the same experimenter (Exp 2) (c) A goal-related activity observable to a different experimenter (Exp 3) Drunken participants were approached for taxi calling by the same experimenter who presented the pledge (c) Household recycling was observed by an independent agent Result Less time spent on related activities in comparison with a condition where the goal was not read Participants were more likely to call a taxi in comparison with those in the no-treatment condition Participants were more likely to recycle in comparison with those in the no-treatment condition Participants were called to ask about their willingness to volunteer for the related cause (c) Participants volunteered more in comparison with those in the no-treatment condition Weight measured in the weight management center (c) Participants achieved more in comparison with those in the control condition   54      Appendix F: The experimental material in Experiment was adopted from the campaign, “Save the Fish” by WWF Singapore The foldable brochure contained actionable recommendation on seafood consumption for ecological sustainability   55  .. .WHEN TELLING THE WORLD WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE CAN BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE YU-CHEN HUNG (B.B.A International Business & B.S Psychology, National Taiwan University) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE. .. aspiration (“I am/I want to be a musician”) Not all of these actions indicate the real achievement of becoming a musician, neither are they all functional to the achievement; nevertheless, these actions... have been inspired by their dedication to scholary pursuit, and their valuable feedbacks have shaped the thesis for better I am indebted to the participants in the brownbag at the NUS for their