One-hundred sixty-eight participants (30 female) were recruited into the study by responding to a posted advertisement published on the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. We restricted the recruitment to participants who were native English speakers, aged between 18 and 30 years and studying at university. Their average age was 26.42 years (SD = 3.39).

We adopted the general experimental structure of Sagarin et al.’s (2002) study, with three groups: demonstrated vulnerability, asserted vulnerability and control. We used two fixation tasks: for our conditioning of the independent variable we used a number task (adapted from Bugelski and Huff’s (1962) revision of Luchins’ (1942) ‘three jars’ task) and for measuring the effect on our dependent variable we used a word task (Cowen and Thompson’s (1951) ‘alphabet maze’ task).