Is shopping therapy effective?
Depends on what you buy, says Arizona State University professor Monika Lisjak.
Her study discovers that buying something that can improve your competence may tend to back-fire, as it reminds you of your flaws.
“What we know from a lot of research is that people do engage in ‘compensatory consumption,’ which is often referred to as ‘retail therapy.’ “It happens when people feel discomfort because they see a discrepancy between how competent they are and how competent they wish to be.
Buying something to improve your competence is called “within-domain compensation,” and it can backfire, she said. Those who shop this way end up dwelling on their problems, Lisjak said.
If you go shopping to feel better and buy a book on how to create a perfect project, it could just remind you over and over of how poorly you did.
That rumination can drain energy, and Lisjak’s study found that people in that state were more likely to have low self-control (expressed by eating M&M candies) and were less likely to do well on tasks (solving math problems).
Lisjak said the results could have implications for marketing, with companies being encouraged to sell products that are “across domain” to take consumers’ minds off their setbacks.
In other words, she says, buy the shoes.
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