Pride and licensing effects: when being good gives us permission to be a little bad

Pride is a powerful self-conscious emotion, which involves both self-assessment and self-awareness (Cheng, Tracy, and Henrich 2010; Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng 2010). Marketers sometimes try to generate a sense of pride in consumers through their commercials. For example, P&G’s “Best Job Sochi 2014 Olympic Game” commercial shows a proud mother watching her child win in the Olympics. From a managerial perspective, if marketers want to tap into this powerful emotion, they should understand its complex effect on choice. This thesis builds on existing research by examining how different types of pride (authentic vs. hubristic pride) influence licensing effects in indulgence.

Previous research examining the influence of pride on indulgence has generally found that pride leads to both indulgence and self-control. The current research suggests that the reason for the conflicting results in the previous research is that pride is not a unitary construct. Rather, the two distinct types of pride—hubristic and authentic— have different consequences on indulgence. The results of this thesis suggest that authentic pride leads to more licensing in indulgence than hubristic pride. I further demonstrate how cognitive resources moderate the effect of pride on indulgence. The results from the last three studies confirm that authentic pride leads to more indulgence than hubristic pride, especially when cognitive resources are available. However, when cognitive resources are limited, hubristic pride leads to more indulgence than authentic pride. This research contributes to our basic understanding of the dynamics of pride on licensing effects.