Events

Professor Rima Toure-Tillery
Associate Professor of Marketing
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Most people wish to maintain a positive self-concept and thus often behave virtuously (e.g., choosing healthy foods, donating to charity, spending responsibly) in an effort to present themselves to themselves in a favorable light (i.e., self-signaling). However, we only need to look around to see that people do not always behave in the most virtuous ways. This is because the motivation to engage in such self-signaling behaviors is not always present. Specifically, this motivation is particularly low when people perceive their actions as unrepresentative of the type of person they are (i.e., as low in self-diagnosticity; Touré-Tillery and Fishbach 2012, 2015). Across a series of studies, we find that people behave less virtuously when they (a) expect to forget (vs. remember) their choices (Touré-Tillery and Kouchaki 2021; Touré-Tillery and Light 2018), (b) perceive their choices as less (vs. more) real (Touré-Tillery and Wang 2022), (c) have an unclear (vs. clear) sense of self (Wang and Touré-Tillery 2024), or (d) are part of a small (vs. large) audience (Jia, Touré-Tillery, and Wang, under revision), because such choices seem less self-diagnostic.