1. thoughtfulanimal
  2. Feeling Down? Science Says Go Shopping (But Use Credit)

Feeling Down? Science Says Go Shopping (But Use Credit)

By jgoldman on May 9, 2011.

My latest piece for LAist just went up:

Retail therapy: It's the answer for almost any problem. Girlfriend broke up with you? Didn't get that promotion? Buy yourself something pretty. People like to shop, especially for high-status items, when they're feeling down. Decades of research has indicated that when a key feature of one's identity is threatened - such as by being passed over for a promotion or being dumped by a former lover - people turn to things. Possessions can allow us to signal our awesomeness to others. And if others think we're awesome, then we just might begin to remember just how awesome we are in the first place.

But parting with cash is also a painful process, so what gives? In a new paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers Niro Sivanathan of the London Business School and Nathan Pettit of Cornell University describe how they think people resolve this conflict...

Read the rest over at LAist.

ResearchBlogging.orgNathan C. Pettit, & Niro Sivanathan (2011). The Plastic Trap: Self-Threat Drives Credit Usage and Status Consumption Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (2), 146-153 : 10.1177/1948550610385138

The original journal article is available free for a limited time.

Tags
decision-making
Psychological Science
Social Psychology

More like this

Conservation Psychology: Think You're Green? Think Again!
Happy Earth Day, everyone! In honor of the day, here's a modified re-post of piece I wrote recently for LAist. Figure 1: Photo by poloroid-girl via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr. The great philosopher Kermit the Frog once said, "It's not that easy being green." Maybe he was on to something. You…
Is there something you are not telling us?
Nature recently ran a story about, what it termed, the "Arizona experiment," changes that have been occurring here at Arizona State University. The article briefly quoted Robert Pettit, the former director of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) which was closed in 2005. Today's Nature features a…
PsychBytes: First Names, Vegetables, and Baseball
PsychBytes is an experiment: three recent findings in psychology, each explained in three paragraphs or less. Generally, these are papers that I wouldn't have otherwise covered in this blog. Please share your thoughts on this model in the comments. What works, and what doesn't? Would you like more…
The Problem of Science Stories
Last week Kate pointed me to this post about heroic stories of science saying "This seems relevant to your interests." And, in fact, a good deal of the post talks about Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History, the Union library's copy of which is sitting on my desk, where I had looked…

crewhat?

Proletarian shopping is the only way I could comply.. So should I steal to stay sane?

By informania (not verified) on 09 May 2011 #permalink

I'm sure if you were willing to pay the appropriate fee, the good folks at Mastercard and Visa would be able to tell you that, probably to the nearest dollar, too. They expend a fair amount of effort to track exactly how much more you'll spend with credit than cash, what you'll spend it on, and when. They then sell that data to marketing departments.