Wang Xiaoming, Zhu Hongjin, Zhao Qinying, Song Chaoqi, Wang Xiuxin
School of Psychology, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, China.
Student Affairs Office, College Students Mental Health Education Center, Anyang Preschool Education College, Anyang, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 9;13:1066938. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1066938. eCollection 2022.
This study, based on self-affirmation theory, aims to investigate the impact of self-uncertainty on individual consumption behavior. Self-uncertainty was categorized into moral, cognitive, and interpersonal self-uncertainty, and different types of self-uncertainty were manipulated through four experiments, including a moral dilemma, a recall paradigm, and a picture quiz task written by E-Prime software to examine the effects of different types of self-uncertainty on conspicuous consumption and their possible boundary conditions. Our results show that moral, cognitive, and interpersonal self-uncertainty contribute to a stronger tendency to engage in conspicuous consumption. Our results also suggest that tolerance of uncertainty moderates the effect of self-uncertainty on conspicuous consumption, meaning that subjects with a high tolerance of uncertainty are less inclined to engage in conspicuous consumption than those with a low tolerance of uncertainty, even if they have high self-uncertainty. This study may provide an explanation for conspicuous consumption behavior, further validating the theory of compensatory consumption. Additionally, the results from this study also provide a reference for understanding people's decision-making behavior in an uncertain social context and can provide new guidance to control irrational consumption behavior.
本研究基于自我肯定理论，旨在探究自我不确定性对个体消费行为的影响。自我不确定性被分为道德、认知和人际自我不确定性，并通过四个实验对不同类型的自我不确定性进行操控，包括一个道德困境、一个回忆范式以及一个由E-Prime软件编写的图片测验任务，以检验不同类型的自我不确定性对炫耀性消费的影响及其可能的边界条件。我们的研究结果表明，道德、认知和人际自我不确定性会导致更强的炫耀性消费倾向。我们的研究结果还表明，不确定性容忍度会调节自我不确定性对炫耀性消费的影响，这意味着不确定性容忍度高的受试者比不确定性容忍度低的受试者更不倾向于进行炫耀性消费，即使他们有较高的自我不确定性。本研究可能为炫耀性消费行为提供一种解释，进一步验证补偿性消费理论。此外，本研究的结果还为理解人们在不确定社会背景下的决策行为提供了参考，并可为控制非理性消费行为提供新的指导。
