Don’t Sweat the Big Stuff: Emphasizing Importance Hinders Goal Pursuit for Consumers Low in Dispositional Self-Control Resources

Abstract

Our research examines goal striving and the effect of importance on self-control outcomes. Extant research has shown that consumers allocate greater self-control resources when faced with more important goals, but we predict and show that emphasizing goal importance leads to worse self-control decisions for individuals lower in dispositional self-control. Specifically, for these consumers, increasing the perceived importance of managing personal finances or maintaining good health leads to a higher likelihood of making a goal-incongruent decision. Additionally, we advance self-control theory by keying in on the role of goal difficulty to explain our proposed backfire effect. Ironically then, our theory and results show that those consumers who naturally have limited self-control resources are worse off when reminded that their self-control goals are, in fact, important.