Abstract
Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants’ relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self-esteem regulates responses to both affordances. When social rewards were primed, lower self-esteem individuals (LSEs) exhibited stronger relationship-initiation motivation than higher self-esteem individuals (HSEs), whereas the reverse was true when social costs were primed. Furthermore, LSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation when rewards were primed, whereas HSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation and used more successful relationship-initiation behaviors when costs were primed. This pattern of results suggests a complex association between social affordances and self-esteem during relationship initiation that is not predicted or explained by current theoretical models and thus deserves further empirical attention.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
