The Motivating and Demotivating Effects of Negative Feedback on Cross-Domain Goal Pursuit Behaviors

Alison Jing Xu, Shirley Y. Y. Cheng and Tiffany Barnett White

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2020, vol. 5, issue 3, 311 - 321

Abstract: This research shows that domain-specific negative feedback motivates consumers to pursue proving goals and demotivates people to pursue enjoyment goals in subsequent, unrelated situations. These motivational consequences not only influence peoples’ subsequent goal pursuit behaviors when a single goal (either a proving goal or an enjoyment goal) is activated (experiment 1), but they also affect consumers’ choice between a proving goal and an enjoyment goal (experiments 2, 3, and 4). Moreover, although receiving negative feedback may give rise to negative affect, negative affect per se did not drive the motivational consequences of negative feedback (experiment 2). Instead, motivation to boost one’s self-view mediates the motivational influence of negative feedback on goal pursuit behaviors in other unrelated domains (experiment 3). In addition, repeated (vs. single) negative feedback reduces its motivational consequences on pursuing proving goals over enjoyment goals (experiment 4).

Date: 2020
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