Black Friday is four weeks from today, launching another holiday shopping season, but a University of Iowa study finds people who are lonely may find themselves unable to resist the impulse to buy.
Marketing Professor Alice Wang, in the UI’s Tippie College of Business, says loneliness is different for everyone, but if someone perceives themselves as having a relationship deficit, they may be more susceptible to compulsive shopping.
Prof. Alice Wang (UI photo)
“When they don’t have the relationship they need, we humans, as social animals, it bothers us,” Wang says. “It’s forefront in the brain. We feel bad, we think about it, we dwell on it, and then the fact that we’re depleted cognitively affects our control.”
In the UI study, Wang says they asked people to think about their existing relationships, and to elaborate on them in writing, perhaps how your current friends helped you through a tough time. Such an exercise can help to change perspectives, she says, and change habits.
“It does make them feel, ‘Oh, you know what? I don’t have as many friends as I want, however, these couple of friends I have are so meaningful and important to me,'” Wang says, “so that was enough to at least temporarily reduce loneliness and therefore reduce subsequent consumption patterns.”
Of course, there’s no magic number of friends we all require, it depends on the individual, but Wang says some of us may benefit from focusing less on what we don’t have and more on all we do have.
“We’re getting close to Thanksgiving,” Wang says, “so maybe instead of being thankful for the materials we have, one nudge we can give to the general public is to be thankful of the relationships we have — and then the quality of the relationships we have.”
As we near the holidays, she suggests people who may be feeling lonely and isolated take stock of the good things in their lives, possessions and people, and work to monitor themselves so they don’t buy things they don’t need.