The Seesaw Self: Possessions, Identity (De)activation, and Task Performance

ABSTRACT Research has shown that possessions have the power to change consumers' self-construal and activate different aspects of the self. Building on this literature, we suggest that the salience of product ownership not only activates the product-related self, but also simultaneously deactivates product-unrelated selves, resulting in impaired performance on tasks unrelated to the activated self. In five experiments, we first elicit feelings of ownership over a product (e.g., a calculator) to activate a product-related identity (e.g., the math self). Participants then engage in a task that is labeled as being a product-related task (e.g., math task) or a product-unrelated task (e.g., visual task). Despite the task being the same, participants in the ownership condition perform worse on a task labeled as product-unrelated than those in the baseline condition. Support for the underlying identity activation process comes from the finding that performance impairment is more likely to hold under conditions o...

• 저널Journal of Marketing Research
• 토픽Cultural Differences and Values · Social Psychology
• DOI10.1509/jmr.16.0099
• 저자Jaeyeon Chung, Gita Venkataramani Johar