Feel Powerless? Buy Something

A new study gives credence to the idea of "retail therapy."

ByABC News
July 1, 2008, 3:36 PM

July 2, 2008 — -- 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."

But buying yourself a fancy gizmo doesn't address the "core problem," said social psychologist Derek D. Rucker, assistant professor of marketing and lead author of the study. Instead of talking it over with the boss and gaining a sense of personal power over your own life, "you indirectly compensate through consumption."

And that, he adds, can lead to a downward economic spiral as you feel more and more powerless to reverse the course. The research is based on three experiments involving scores of undergraduate students at the university.

Rucker readily admits that power is not an easy subject to study.

"Power is a very complex construct," he said in a telephone interview.

"Power stems from general issues of control, from status, from expertise, from knowledge, and so, there's lots of potential ways to look at it. We do it experimentally. In our studies, we induce the feelings of power or powerlessness just by having people recall a time in their past when they remember feeling powerful or powerless."

That might seem to be a very transient emotion, but in previous research, Rucker's co-author, Adam D. Galinsky, demonstrated that the feeling of power, or lack of it, usually lasts at least 30 minutes after recalling a previous experience. That's enough time for the researchers to determine if a person, who feels robbed of power, is more likely to spend lavishly on something like an executive fountain pen with the name of the university embossed in gold.