People who are experiencing financial hardship often feel ashamed about their financial situation. This experienced shame prevents them from seeking contact with their creditor. A way to cope with...Show morePeople who are experiencing financial hardship often feel ashamed about their financial situation. This experienced shame prevents them from seeking contact with their creditor. A way to cope with this experienced shame is to build shame resilience. We built on shame resilience theory (Brown, 2006) by focusing on two elements: fostering connectedness and addressing shame. Participants were randomly assigned to the control condition or to the shame-resilience condition. In the control condition, participants read a standard creditor email. In the shame resilience condition, participants read an email that fostered connectedness and addressed shame. Our shame resilience email didn’t lead to a significant higher willingness to contact the helping organization or a decrease in avoidant tendencies. Our shame resilience email did lead to a significant decrease in shame. A practical implication of this is that we found a way to approach people experiencing (financial) shame, in order to reduce their shame.Show less
Financial scarcity raises negative consequences on individual and societal level. Much help is offered, but many people do not seek help. The goal of this research is to test whether an...Show moreFinancial scarcity raises negative consequences on individual and societal level. Much help is offered, but many people do not seek help. The goal of this research is to test whether an intervention designed to increase perceived financial self-efficacy increases the likelihood that people with financial problems take appropriate action. It is hypothesized that participants who are presented with a self-efficacy heightening website of an organisation that offers them financial help, perceive this organisation as more positive, are more likely to contact the organisation, and handle their situation more constructively (Hypothesis 1a, 1b, and 1c). It is expected that these effects are stronger when participants experience less control (Hypothesis 2a, 2b, and 2c). Results support hypothesis 1c and partly support hypothesis 2a: participants in the experimental condition rated the organisation as warmer, the lower they scored on self-efficacy, but not as more moral and competent. The other hypotheses were not supported.Show less
