When failure feels better than success: Self-salience, self-consistency, and affect

Abstract

People like self-consistent feedback because it induces feelings of predictability and control, but they like positive feedback because it induces positive self-esteem. We show that self-salience determines whether people are more consistency- or positivity-driven. When self-knowledge is salient, people's primary responses (i.e., under load) are consistency-driven (people with low self-esteem feel better after negative feedback than after positive feedback, whereas people with high self-esteem feel better after positive feedback than after negative feedback) and controlled responses are positivity-driven (people feel better after positive feedback than after negative feedback, regardless of self-consistency). Without salient self-knowledge this pattern reverses: people's primary responses are positivity-driven, whereas people's controlled responses are consistency-driven.