PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Boney-McCoy et al. / SELF-ESTEEM AND RISK CONSIDERATION Self-Esteem, Compensatory Self-Enhancement, and the Consideration of Health Risk

Acknowledging that one engages in risk-increasing behavior is a form of self-generated negative feedback that can engender self-protective responses. This experiment examined the use of one of these reactions, compensatory self-enhancement, following a manipulation that made high and low self-esteem participants explicitly consider their sexual risk behaviors. Participants with high (but not low) self-esteem responded to the manipulation by self-enhancing on both personality ratings and ratings of their contraceptive behavior. Positive self-ratings on personality traits were negatively associated with subsequent ratings of perceived vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases. Researchers have devoted significant effort to under-standing the factors that influence people to engage in preventive behaviors or to terminate risky ones. Several models of risk behavior suggest that people’s percep-tions of health risk will influence prophylaxis (e.g., the health belief model, Rosenstock, 1974; protection moti-vation theory, Rogers, 1983; the precaution adoption process, Weinstein, 1988). Accordingly, a common goal of public service announcements or health campaigns has been to induce audiences to consider their risk for