| The perception of personal control is commonly threatened throughout the course of everyday life. This dissertation examines whether and how such experiences influence consumers' downstream judgments and decisions. Specifically, this dissertation investigates the impact of incidental threats to personal control on consumers' outcome expectancies and decisions in the context of financial decision making. Results from seven empirical studies reveal that incidental threats to personal control paradoxically result in more positive outcome expectancies, such that threatened consumers tend to believe that their investment outcomes are more likely to be positive. Owing to this reduction in perceived risk, threatened consumers are also shown to exhibit greater risk taking. I argue this occurs because personal control threats heighten consumers' desire to perceive themselves as competent, thereby motivating them to believe that their decisions and behaviors in unrelated domains will be effective in producing desired outcomes. Consistent with this idea, results further show that the effect is more pronounced in scenarios where people perceive positive outcomes as being more rather than less diagnostic of their competence. |
