The Influence of Spending Guilt on the Consumer Decision-Making Process

The amount of money a consumer is willing to spend to acquire a good ought to be a valid measure of valuation. Instead, consumers rely on heuristics about how they should spend money. When consumers think about spending money in ways that violate their beliefs about how it should be spent, they anticipate feeling guilty which reduces the expected utility and the likelihood of making the purchase. Because of this anticipatory guilt, consumer decisions made in a spending context can lead to different outcomes than consumer decisions in equivalent contexts that do not use money. The results of Studies 1a-1c show that people have standards for how they should spend their money and anticipate feeling guilty if they consider violating them. Studies 2a-2b measure spending-guilt-proneness and test its effect on purchase intentions. In Study 3 the salience of spending norms is increased, reducing purchase intentions for hedonic goods. In Studies 4a, 4b, 5, and 6, the salience of money in preference measures is decreased, and when spending money is less salient, preferences for hedonic goods increase. Finally, in Studies 7a-7b reducing anticipated guilt mitigates this disutility