Money Feelings

Hyun Young Park and Tom Meyvis, recently posted their paper, “Feeling Immoral About Money: How Moral Emotions Influence Spending Decisions” on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

Prior literature suggests that consumers who feel negative moral emotions engage in a moral compensation process that is generalized and flexible. In contrast, the current research demonstrates that consumers who feel guilty or angry about money seek compensation in a strikingly specific way. We find that feeling guilty about money increases pro-social spending, but not volunteering of time or spending on personal virtues. Moreover, this increase in pro-social spending only occurs when the guilt is moral in nature and the money being spent is the money consumers feel guilty about. The specific nature of this effect suggests that consumers who feel guilty about money try to cleanse the money rather than try to redeem themselves. Feeling angry about money, on the other hand, is shown to decrease pro-social spending, highlighting the need to distinguish between specific emotions when examining how feelings about money affect consumer spending decisions.

Download the paper for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• The Situational Consequences of Poverty on Brains
• Resisting Materialism
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

The Situational Consequences of Consumption

Douglas Kysar and Michael Vandenbergh have just posted a fascinating paper, “Climate Change and Consumption,” on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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To achieve the level of greenhouse gas emissions reductions called for by climate change experts, officials and policy analysts may need to develop an unfamiliar category of regulated entity: the consumer. Although industrial, manufacturing, retail, and service sector firms undoubtedly will remain the focus of climate change policy in the near term, individuals and households exert a greenhouse footprint that seems simply too large for policymakers to ignore in the long term. This paper, written as a foreword for the Environmental Law Reporter’s symposium issue, “Climate Change and Consumption,” emerges from an interdisciplinary conference of the same title held at Vanderbilt University in April 2008. The paper begins by providing an overview of the limited role that consumer behavior and decision making has played in environmental law to date. It then describes theoretical and empirical frameworks for understanding the consumer and consumption that could be deployed to inform law and policy if, as we predict, the consumer becomes a much more significant target of environmental regulation. The paper concludes by summarizing the symposium articles, which range widely across disciplines and areas of focus, but which reflect a common belief that the carbon-constrained consumer is worthy of significant academic and policy attention.

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For some related Situationist posts, see ” The Situation of Ethical Consumption” and “The Need for a Situationist Morality.”

Situation of Consumption

Lee Dye of ABC News wrote a fascinating story about a revealing study that contends that the more powerless we are feeling, the more likely we are to try to reclaim a sense of power and status through the gadgets that we purchase. The following excerpts are taken from the ABC story.

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Want to know why you just bought that gadget that you really can’t afford? Because you were feeling like a wimp.

A new study out of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., shows that the more often we feel powerless, the more likely we are to spend ourselves into the poor house. The study, published in the current edition of the Journal of Consumer Research, contends that when the boss puts you down, you feel so robbed of power that you’re more likely to go out and buy yourself some status symbol. When that happens, you’re willing to pay a lot more for it than if you felt powerful, a process the researchers call “compensatory consumption.”

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If his study is on target, when the sense of power goes down, so does your wallet. That’s partly because we tend to associate power with status. So, if we lose power, the researchers contend, we may try to make up for that loss, at least emotionally, by buying a status symbol.

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If his study is on target, when the sense of power goes down, so does your wallet. That’s partly because we tend to associate power with status. So, if we lose power, the researchers contend, we may try to make up for that loss, at least emotionally, by buying a status symbol.

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To read the entire article click here. For a related Situationist post, check out “Why You Bought That,” “Just Choose It!” and “The Science of Addiction, The Myth of Choice.” Image by by Giando [♀] Flickr.