The Essentialized Self: Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation
Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2019 · Volume 29 · Issue 2
Abstract
Persuasion attempts are more likely to stick and less likely to be counterargued if they fit the ways people naturally make sense of themselves and their world. One way to do that is to yoke persuasion to the social categories people experience as “true” and “natural.” Gelman and Echelbarger's (2019) integrative review of essentialism outlines the emergence of essentialism in children's reasoning. Connecting their discussion with identity-based motivation theory (D. Oyserman, 2015) and a culture-as-situated cognition (D. Oyserman, 2017) perspective, this commentary addresses how an essentialized self can facilitate or impair motivation and self-regulation and potentiate or undermine persuasive efforts.
Keywords
Self and identity, Social cognition, Meta-cognition and metacognitive experience, Preference and choice, Identity-based motivation
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.