Impulsive Buying and Social Exclusion

Impulsive buying has been defined as the spontaneous or sudden desire to buy something and causes great damage and hurt consumers themselves and people around them. Therefore it would be meaningful to explain the phenomenon and mechanism of impulsive buying by focusing on the psychological features of the impulsive buying. People experience exclusion and discrimination in various situations, which naturally lead to negative emotions and use various methods, one of which is the strategy of cognitive narrowing to relieve the stress and tension caused by these negative emotions. This cognitive narrowing strategy sometimes affects their cognitive process and lead to various deviant behavior including self-defeating behavior. The purpose of current study is to explore how self-defeating behavior in overcoming negative emotions caused by social exclusion affects impulse buying. This study investigated how social exclusion experience influences on the impulsive buying tendency. The aim of this research is to examine the mechanism through impulsive buying. Present study was performed with 99 undergraduate students. Participants were randomly appointed to the condition under which they have experienced social exclusion and the condition under which they have not. Authors analyzed how the level of impulsive buying tendency differs depending on the social exclusion experience. Authors used t-test to analyze how the experience of social exclusion influences on the tendency of impulsive buying differs. According to the results, the impulsive buying tendency of the group who experienced social exclusion was higher than that of the group who did not experience it. and the difference was statistically significant. People with the experience of social exclusion tend to show higher impulsive buying than people without such an experience. These results can be seen as follows. First, social exclusion experience can be emotional distress and lead to self-destructive behavior and one of the self-defeating behavior is impulsive buying. Second, in order to reduce negative emotions people tend to reduce self-awareness. Finally, as we can see that impulsive buyers report positive emotional experiences when buying impulsively and impulses to buy would arise when people’s self-regulatory capacity is reduced, impulsive buying can be viewed as a result of self-destructive behavior due to social exclusion, and as an inevitable strategy to overcome negative emotions caused by social exclusion. The social exclusion experiences elude negative emotions, leading to the immediate, specific and low-level tasks such as shopping or purchasing. Based on these results, academic implications and practical implications were discussed. In addition, limitations of this study and future research were suggested.