A Circumplex Model of Compensatory Consumption

When people’s self-concept is threatened, they often compensate by exhibiting their positive personal qualities. Seeking out products and brands conveying a positive identity signal is one avenue for threat compensation. Research on symbolic self-completion has emphasized compensation within the threatened domain, while research on self-affirmation has emphasized compensation in domains other than the threatened one. The present research integrates these theoretical traditions by developing a model stipulating which domain is most likely to become the focus of compensatory consumption. Using Schwartz’s circumplex model to organize the different self-aspects that people value, we define three levels of threat-relevance: values that are compatible with the threatened domain, opposing values that are in tension with the threatened domain, and orthogonal values that are unrelated to the threatened domain. According to our framework, threat-orthogonal domains, even dispositionally important ones, have low threat relevance and should rarely be the focus of compensatory efforts. Instead, compensation focuses either on the threatened or the threat-opposing domain, depending on which one has greater chronic personal importance. Four experiments document that compensatory consumption follows this hypothesized pattern of priority, thus clarifying how symbolic self-completion and self-affirmation dynamics are most likely to be expressed in the aftermath of a self-threat.