In the face of self-threat: Why ambivalence heightens people’s willingness to act

The pursuit of desirable outcomes is often hindered by the threat of failure. While extant research largely characterizes self-threatening outcomes as eliciting an avoidance motivation, the current work demonstrates a novel intervention that can shift people towards an approach motivation: ambivalence towards the outcome. Within professional and personal domains, we show in seven experiments that considering both the pros and cons, rather than just the pros, of a self-threatening outcome encourages people to pursue it. We find that this heightened approach motivation occurs because ambivalence reduces an outcome’s desirability, in turn reducing self-threat, serially mediating the relationship between ambivalence and likelihood of pursuing the outcome. Further, we show that people do not intuit this effect and are likely not taking advantage of it. We conclude by discussing the managerial and theoretical implications of ambivalence in the face of self-threat.