This study, based on self-affirmation theory, aims to investigate the impact of self-uncertainty on individual consumption behavior. Self-uncertainty was categorized into moral, cognitive, and interpersonal self-uncertainty, and different types of self-uncertainty were manipulated through four experiments, including a moral dilemma, a recall paradigm, and a picture quiz task written by E-Prime software to examine the effects of different types of self-uncertainty on conspicuous consumption and their possible boundary conditions. Our results show that moral, cognitive, and interpersonal self-uncertainty contribute to a stronger tendency to engage in conspicuous consumption.
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