When shoppers feel financially insecure, the decreased psychological power makes them want to chow down fattening foods. Researchers at Tilburg University and HEC Montréal found this to be true with measures of caloric desire and actual eating behavior.
Marquee retailers may be onto something by including in their stores a restaurant with food which fits the personality of the merchandise and the location. Late last year, the flagship Tommy Bahama store in Manhattan started serving Macadamia-nut encrusted snapper for a tropical flavor and pineapple cheesecake in a bow to New York style. Urban Outfitters, with a college-town personality, is featuring striped bass at its Westport, Connecticut home-and-garden store.
Sexual hungers, too, are associated with purchasing in direct and also indirect ways. Northwestern University researchers showed a group of men photographs of physically attractive women and asked these men to decide which one they’d prefer to take out on a date if ever given the opportunity. A matching group of men were asked to think about getting a haircut at the barber. Although we might consider the first group the fantasy condition and the second group the boring-life condition, the researchers were aiming for something else: They considered the first group as developing more of a mating goal than the second group.
Once this difference was produced, all the men in both groups were asked to look at images of high-end sports cars while hosting in their mouths the type of cotton rolls you encounter in the dental chair. The objective was to measure any differences in amount of salivation.
The men in the mating goal group salivated more when viewing the sports car images than did those in the haircut group. A mouth-watering sports car operates on the brain in the same sort of way as a mouth-watering food.
As in the Tilburg/HEC studies, the effect is greatest for consumers who feel they have relatively low psychological power.
Conversely, handling money can satiate a hunger for influence over circumstances. Psychologists at University of Minnesota, Florida State University, and China’s Sun Yat-Sen University had a group of study participants count out eighty $100 bills. A matching group were assigned to count out eighty blank pieces of paper. All participants were then exposed to tasks in which they experienced social rejection and physical stress.
The people who had worked with the $100 bills reported less discomfort during and after the tasks.
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