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Sad People Willing to Spend More Money

Feeling glum drives spending for a specific type of individual, shows research by social psychologists at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon Universities.

For their study, "Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More," 33 test subjects were randomly assigned to watch a sad or neutral video clip. Next, those subjects who watched the sad clip wrote about how a similar situation would affect them personally. Subjects who watched to neutral clip wrote about their daily activities.

Each participant was compensated $10 for their participation. After the first part of the study, they were shown a plastic sports drinking bottle and asked, in increasing 50 cent increments, whether they would be willing to exchange a given amount of their earnings for the bottle.

After this step, subjects were asked how intensely they felt a variety of emotions including "depressed," "indifferent" and "sad."

Subjects who watched the sad video rated themselves significantly sadder than those who had watched the neutral clip. Interestingly, these sad subjects also offered an average of about 300 percent more for the water bottle at an average price of $2.11 versus $0.56.

To determined how self-focused each participant was, independent coders rated each participant's writing response for use of words such as "I," "me" and myself." The more a subject used these words, the more self-focused he or she was rated.

Ultimately, researchers found that sadness had a great impact on spending in self-focused individuals, but little impact on less self-focused subjects.

FULL TEXT: Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More