People Buy Expensive Things When they Feel Down

Whenever people feel low, they have the tendency to make expensive purchases, the results of a new psychological research revealed. Experts say that, whenever people do this, they tend to pay using their credit card, perhaps in an attempt to make the financial blow to the budget easier to handle.

One of the reasons for why this is happening, experts say, is that people feel like they could improve their self-worth and self-image if they do so. On the other hand, previous studies have shown that purchasing things with cash can be painful from a psychological perspective.

As such, the research team decided to check and see whether using credit cards would make shoppers more likely to spend. Self-worth was again taken as an indicative factor for this correlation.

This study was led by Cornell University researcher Niro Sivanathan, PhD and PhD student Nathan Pettit. They put together a group of participants, and then divided them into two groups.

The subjects were asked to resolve an ambiguous computer test, but 50 percent of them were told that they are not very smart. Researchers lied to them that their spatial reasoning and logic ability was in the 12th percentile.

The other half was told that its performances were in the 88th percentile, which is above average. All participants were then asked about how much they are willing to pay for a new consumer product.

Those who were told they were not that smart tended to express their intention of buying the products with a credit card, as opposed to those in the other group, who expressed no such desires.

Participants were more likely to pay extra for the product. Also, about two thirds of them said that they wanted to pay for the product with a credit card. The product in question was a pair of designer jeans, as opposed to a standard pair of jeans, PsychCentral reports.

One of the conclusions that experts draw from the new study is that buying expensive, luxury products is one of the best way for people to boost their self-esteem or self-value. The exact reason why this happens is still a mystery to experts.

It was also found that some of the guilt that people feel from spending large sums of money on a single product is offset by the fact that the purchase is done via credit card.