chapTer 6 The Self: Mind, Gender, and Body 207

cb aS i See iT
Derek D. Rucker, Northwestern University

psychological threat—when one feels to offset the psychological state of

W hat meaning do you attach to
products and brands? If you are
like many consumers, products and
brands have psychological utility in
addition, and perhaps in some cases
exceeding, their functional value.
A Louis Vuitton handbag is not just
a container for holding personal
objects; a Ferrari is not simply a
vehicle to get a consumer from point
A to point B; and a sweatshirt of
one’s undergraduate alma mater is
not merely a piece of clothing to stay
warm. Rather, each of these objects
has the potential to signal one’s
identity to both the self and others.
Of particular interest to me is how
unsuccessful in an important domain
of the self-concept— shapes the type
of products one desires. Specifically,
the notion that people might cope with
threat through consumption is termed,
compensatory consumption.
In my first foray into compensatory
consumption, I demonstrated that
psychological threats in the form
of feeling powerless could affect
consumption. Feeling powerless
represents a psychological threat
in that people often desire power
(i.e., control over precious resources
in relation to others). My colleague
Adam Galinsky and I proposed that,
as power is intimately associated
with status, when consumers feel
powerless they might exhibit a shift
in preferences towards objects
associated with status. To test this
idea, we instructed undergraduate
students to write about a time they felt
powerless or powerful. Subsequently,
participants indicated their reservation
price for a framed portrait of their
university that was either described
as scarce (high-status) or as common
(low-status). Participants who had
written about a past experience of
feeling powerless were willing to
pay more for the framed portrait of
their university, but only when that
framed portrait was represented as
scarce (i.e., high status). Essentially,
consumers, seemingly unbeknownst
to themselves, sought consumption
feeling powerless.
However, the fact consumers engage
in compensatory consumption does
not mean consumption is always an
antidote for a psychological threat.
In work with Monika Lisjak, Andrea
Bonezzi, and Soo Kim, we demonstrated
that compensatory consumption
can worsen psychological threat. For
example, in one experiment we first
threatened participants’ perceptions
of their intelligence and then we gave
them the opportunity to either select a
product that signaled intelligence or a
product that signaled sociability. Finally,
we measured participants’ tendency
to ruminate on (i.e., repeatedly think
about) the threatening experience. We
found that participants who chose a
product that signaled success in the
domain of threat, which in theory can
offset the threat, heightened rumination
about the threat. Furthermore,
additional experiments suggest that,
as a consequence of rumination,
participants perform poorer on tasks
that involved subsequent attention,
such as completing math problems.
My current work continues to try to
understand how consumers protect
their sense of self in the face of
psychological threat. I hope to answer
the question of when consumption is a
sound salve for threat versus a hollow
substitute as a means to understand
the powerful and transformative
effects of brands and products.

concrete relationships (e.g., “I own it”) to more sophisticated, abstract relationships (e.g.,
“It is like me”).61
Our use of consumption information to define the self is especially important when we
have yet to completely form a social identity, such as when we have to play a new role in life.
Think, for example, of the insecurity many of us felt when we first started college or reen-
tered the dating market after leaving a long-term relationship. Symbolic self-completion
theory suggests that people who have an incomplete self-definition tend to complete this
identity when they acquire and display symbols they associate with that role.62
Adolescent boys, for example, may use “macho” products such as cars and cigarettes
to bolster developing masculinity; these items act as a “social crutch” during a period of
uncertainty about their new identity as adult males. As we mature into a role, we actually