Back in 1982, psychology professors Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer published a book with some intriguing data showing that MBA students who had lousy grades and few job offers compensated with attempts at retail therapy. The underperforming students bought themselves things that the top MBAs were likely to have, including expensive suits, watches and briefcases. Now a paper by Kellogg School of Management marketing professor Derek Rucker examines some of the effects buying a Rolex would have on a failing MBA candidate. Would it help him study more diligently, do better on the next test and fare better in the job market? According to Rucker’s research, the answer is no. In fact it’s worse than that. Buying the pricey watch will make the student focus on his shortcomings and do worse than if he hadn’t made the purchase. But Rucker’s study offers two intriguing suggestions: If the student bought a pair of running shoes instead, it could help him up his grades. One other thing that could help, according to the paper: If the student’s classmates profusely complimented him on the new watch.
Rucker’s paper, which he authored together with three former students, starts to strip away some of the effects of different kinds of retail therapy. Many of us want to buy stuff that we think will compensate for our faults or, like the MBA students, make us appear to be doing better than we are. For instance, if your boss gives you a negative performance review because he says you’re disorganized, you may want to run out to Staples and get a new day planner and some file folders, or blow a wad of cash on a new computer that can run higher-powered database software. That kind of buying is what Rucker and his colleagues call “in-domain compensatory consumption.” In other words the purchases are directly related to the perceived fault. Since successful MBAs can afford Rolexes and Louis Vuitton briefcases, those items are considered “within domain” for the struggling business student. Running shoes or backpacks would be considered “across domain” purchases.
Going into the study, Rucker says he and his team hypothesized that “in domain” buys would hinder rather than help people who were struggling with various deficits. He figured that a purchase that reminded you of your faults would bring your focus back to the faults, rather than shift it elsewhere. The team also thought that the purchase would distract you during future tasks. Plus they wondered if other kinds of acquisitions would have a different effect, and whether there were any way that “in domain” purchases could help the purchaser.
To test these ideas, Rucker and his colleagues ran five experiments. In the studies, the subjects wrote about times when they felt incompetent or not as smart as they should have been and/or a time when they didn’t feel sociable or friendly enough. In the first experiment the researchers then asked some of the study subjects to describe a possession that made them feel more competent, like an award or a diploma, and others to describe a possession that made them feel more social, like a photo taken at a party where they were surrounded by friends. Then the researchers told the subjects that they were participating in a different study that involved eating as many M&Ms as they wanted to, in order to evaluate the candy. The result: participants who wrote essays about feeling incompetent and followed those up with a description of a possession that made them feel smarter, ate far more M&Ms than those who described a possession that made them feel more social. In other words, compensating for a fault prompted the subjects to ruminate on their problems and lose their sense of self-control. “When I’m ruminating, I’m distracted and I keep eating M&Ms, even though I know they’re not healthy,” says Rucker.
In the second experiment, the researchers told the participants to imagine playing a board game that showed their skills and smarts or to write about a party game that was fun and social. After the writing exercises, the researchers gave them 120 math problems and asked them to solve as many as they could in three minutes. As in the first experiment, the participants who wrote about being incompetent and then about playing a board game that tested their smarts, did worse on the math problems than those who wrote about being incompetent but then considered the “across domain” notion of a social game. “When I try to compensate in the same domain, it keeps the threat more active in my mind,” says Rucker. “The more distracted I am, the harder it is to engage in any task.”
In the third and fourth experiments, the researchers presented the participants with similar challenges. Participants who wrote about feeling incompetent could choose items that could make them feel smarter, like a gift card for a language course, a subscription to Scientific American or a book titled, Genius: Simple Ways to Become Instantly Smarter. Again the subjects who had written about feeling incompetent and then chose one of the intelligence-enhancing products reported that those products reminded them of how incompetent they felt.
The fifth experiment was similar, except that the researchers added in an important variable: They told some of the participants that they had made smart choices when the subjects picked particular items. In addition to the products that were supposedly intelligence-enhancing, participants who had written about their social deficits could choose stuff that would make them more social, like a gift card for a karaoke lounge or a book called Connected: Foster and Strengthen Your Social Network. After praising the choices of some of the participants, the researchers had all of them do a self-regulation test called the Stroop task where they had to identify a font color on a screen that spells color words like “red” or “blue” that are different from the font. The participants whose product choices had been validated did better on the Stroop task then those who made their choices with no feedback.
What does all this mean? Does retail therapy remind people of their shortcomings, distract them from cognitive tasks and break down their self-control? The paper suggests that all of those things happen, unless someone tells the person that he made a smart choice in getting the product he hoped would make him more competent. In other words, Rucker and his team’s work suggests if the MBA who buys the Brioni suit gets a lot of feedback from his peers and professors about how great he looks and that he’s chosen a killer interview outfit, he may do better the next time he takes an exam or does an interview. “If you were to use a disease metaphor,” says Rucker, “it’s not a cure but it definitely takes care of the symptoms.”
My takeaway from all of this: Retail therapy that’s directly related to the thing you feel bad about will very likely wind up making you feel worse, and will also make you screw up even more than you already have. On the other hand, if you can shake your preoccupation and, say, if you’re an MBA student, pick up some running shoes or a bicycle that distracts you from your failures, there’s a good chance you’ll at least feel better about yourself and not perform any worse than you’re already performing.
Rucker’s paper will be published in the February 2015 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. The paper's three other authors are Monika Lisjak, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Erasmus University's Rotterdam School of Management, Andrea Bonezzi, Assistant Professor of Marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business and Soo Kim, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Cornell's Samuel Curtis Johnson School of Management,
