Moments of Weakness: Five Impulse Spending Triggers

Do you know what your weak spot is? Is it the shoe section in Harvey Nicks or those racks of beauty products at the airport? Do you buy more food when you're hungry (who doesn't)? More clothes when you're stressed? More gifts when feeling guilty? More of anything-that-isn't-nailed-down when you're pre-menstrual and have just been paid?

People rarely buy stuff for utilitarian reasons. Buying is more often the result of mind-boggling marketing tricks, seductive store layouts and a whole host of biological, psychological and even evolutionary factors.  

Purchasing decisions aren't always made rationally

We aren't always in as much control as we'd like to be, as the growing number of people with credit card debts or compulsive shopping disorders will testify. And men and women shop differently, with more women inclined to spend on impulse.

Impulse buys are a buyer's curse and a seller's dream. 

A recent article on the excellent Huffington Post website has captured the Five Big Moments When You're Most Likely to Overspend. 

According to their writer Candace Braun, those moments of weakness are when:

You're Mindful of The Time:  A slogan that urged people to "spend a little time, enjoy C&D's lemonade," resulted in more people buying a drink, and paying 51% more for it (compared to a those who saw a sign that asked them to "spend a little money"). This 2008 study from Stanford University showed that  'spending time' feels more like buying an experience, not just handing over hard-earned cash. Slogans linked to time, like 'thank Crunchie it's Friday' work in the same way.

If the time seems right.....

You're Trying to Avoid The Crowds: You may feel super-organised shopping at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday, when Tesco is blissfully quiet, but your purse could take a bigger hit.  Being in a crowd makes us less likely to overspend, according to a Journal of Consumer Research study. We are more focused on getting out unscathed than on making another purchase.

I know you didn't come out to buy this, but here you are!

You've Got Money in Another Account: That offer of the £100 bonus for opening an extra account seems a no-brainer. However, a May 2013 study found that people tend to save more when they have just one place to deposit money.  Researchers say that with one account it's easier to keep track of how much is in there -- and how much you're spending. When we have multiple accounts, it's easy to spend from one while feeling reassured there's money in the other account too.

You've Got to Buy Something Embarrassing: To try and mask the embarrassing item in their basket, almost 80 percent of people will pile in unnecessary extras to divert the cashier's and other shoppers' attention, a Journal of Consumer Research study found. Online shopping could be the answer here!

Gift purchases are less guilt-ridden

You Need Some Retail Therapy: It's common to feel the urge to splurge when emotions are high or mood is low. My research has also shown that 75 percent of women are more likely to overspend or impulse buy when treating someone else. Feeling low can lead to us literally trying to buy happiness and buying gifts for those we care about can help us feel more connected to them, as we say in Sheconomics. Of course, buying for someone else doesn't induce as much guilt either when money is tight.

Thanks again to the Huffington Post for bringing these spending triggers to light, and for including Sheconomics in their article - it's always nice to reach out to our US readers - issues with money cross cultural boundaries and oceans too.

Oh it's a hot water bottle cover and other tell-tale signs of failed gifts.

Yes, Christmas has been sprung on us again this year (how did that happen?) and the potential for danger once again is huge. 
And I don't mean danger from fizzling fairy lights that the cat peed on, or from undercooked turkey or oversozzled relatives. 
No, I mean the danger of the disastrous gift. 

A large proportion of presents, probably at least a third, are destined to bring out the liar in us all. The biggest lie spoken over the festive period being, "It's just what I always wanted."
My previous research has found a number of facts about failed festive gifts, i.e.:

• 89% of women will pretend to like a gift they hate, 79% of men will.
• Half of all people get at least one present they dislike.
• Half will lie to a loved one about a gift, pretending to like it.
• 1 in 4 people say giving a gift makes them feel anxious.
• 1 in 5 people say receiving a gift makes them feel anxious.
• Men find the whole gift giving and getting thing maore anxiety inducing than women.

But of course we're all very good at hiding our true feelings about those bungled pressies aren't we? Not so. My research also showed that our true feelings leak out in our non-verbal behaviour, even when we're professing to love something. Notably:

• We make eye contact with the giver if we like the gift. If we don't like it we avoid eye contact.
• We produce a fake smile using only the mouth (not the eye) muscles when pretending to like a gift.
• We display a gift we like and show it off to others, but are more likely to rewrap or cover a disliked gift.

It's also been found that when we don't like a gift (and therefore don't know what to say about it) we're likely to simply announce what the gift is. 

As in, "Oh, it's a HOT-WATER BOTTLE COVER." 

Said aloud, with rising intonation, it's a sure give away you're really thinking "What the hell...."

So how can we avoid making the recipients of our offerings squirm on Christmas Day? 

A number of ‘rules’ about gift exchange emerged from my research. They are

• ·      Appropriateness

A gift that’s right will be of an appropriate value and level of intimacy. It shouldn’t violate relationship boundaries by being too intimate or too extravagant for the current status of the relationship.

• ·      Empathy

A positive gift will be imbued with shared meaning, show understanding of need and signal a connection in the relationship. Failed gifts are often empty of meaning and/or show lack of understanding.

• ·      Effort

A successful gift will have required the giver to put in some effort into choosing the desired object. Gifts low on substance and sentiment send out the wrong message.

I hope all your gifts are well-received this Christmas and that all that come your way are just what you always wanted. If they're not, well, you could always open them in the dark in silence then no-one will ever know....

Do women dress for men - or women?

So, apparently, women spend almost £84,000 on clothes in their lifetime. 
And they are dressing more seductively in the economic downturn to increase their chances of nabbing that rare thing, a man with a decent job.

Or that’s the spin that the Daily Mail put on a recent study to come out of Texas Christian University.

As if it was really that simple, that women just dress to impress men.

In an earlier blog I did point out that high heels force women to adopt a posture reminiscent of randy babboons and, sure, that’s all about appearing seductive. 
But women who expose too much flesh can actually be harming their career prospects.
I still find the enclothed cognition argument compelling, i.e. that women dress to impress themselves, since certain clothes make them feel better, give them confidence and lift their mood (even if there’s not a man in sight).

Clearly it’s complicated. There seem to be three factors at work:

1.    Evolutionary psychologists have shown us that clothing sends out all kinds of sexual signals (red for fertility, high heels for fecundity). This is the ‘women dress to attract men’ argument.

2.    Then there’s the function of clothes for emotional regulation, which is born out by my research showing that women select clothes accord to their moods. This could be seen as the ‘women dress for themselves’ argument.

3.    There’s a third factor too. It’s the ‘women dress for other women’ point of view.  Take a look at this:

Letter from a popular Sunday newspaper supplement.

£600 for a scarf? What credit crunch? 
That aside, could it be that women dress to get one over on the competition as this letter suggests? 

Blogger Nikolas Lloyd thinks yes (and has kindly allowed me to quote his theory here):

Imagine a society in which there are not very many women around who are available. Such a society was the one in which we evolved. In the world of the forager, a potential mate came along seldom, and one usually only had a small selection of women from which to choose a life partner. In this society, a woman who had known the local men for ages and was on good terms with them, was very nice, but perhaps not the best looking or a little bit past her prime, might lose out to some slip of a thing who walked out of the forest. A foreign woman might out-compete all the local women, even if she hardly spoke the language, if she was young and pretty, and this would not please the local women. What could these women do to keep the stranger out? Well, just as language seems to have evolved partly to keep out outsiders (a human who has learned a language as an adult will almost never fully master it and pass as a local), so too could fashion. The local women could make it next to impossible for the foreigner to pass as a local, and become accepted in society, by coming up with many arbitrary and subtle rules of fashion.

So Lloyd thinks women dress in a way that helps them fit in with their social group and keep out intruders. Identification with one's social group is clearly one purpose of fashion. And one way we signal our affiliation with a social group is through clothing: this is true whether your group is a Mayan tribe, or mums at the school gate. 
He's got a point. 
It's quite likely that those other women are far more likely to notice what you're wearing than any passing male.

How to dress for success

Watch a video here about first impressions and how to dress for success.....



it's great to see our University of Hertfordshire research featured in this video, which reinforces the message conveyed in an earlier post that dress disasters can ruin your job prospects ... without you even knowing it.

Made it to the top - but the view's not what we expected...

I know I've banged on quite a bit about women on boards, but here's a health warning. 

It seems that when women do get to the top many are faced with a glass cliff and left dangling over a dangerous company precipice.

Women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions
when an organisation is in crisis.

By 2015 Lord Davies wants 25% female representation on boards (yes, one in four – an odd way of construing equality I know). And this year’s figures suggest everything’s on target to achieve it. In the FTSE100 women now account for 15.6% of all directorships, up from 12.5% last year. And although there are still 11 all-male boards, at least that’s down from last year’s staggering 21.

But last week, when talking to Ernst and Young about diversity, a lovely lady there alerted me to the notion of the glass cliff. 

Yes, we’ve heard of the glass ceiling – that invisible put impenetrable barrier that hinders female advancement in the workplace -  and even the glass escalator that gives men a smooth ride to the top, but the glass cliff? 

It comes from research by Ryan and Haslam at the University of Exeter who, in a systematic study of the performance of FTSE 100 companies before and after appointing a board member, found that companies who appointed a woman were more likely to have experienced consistently poor performance in the months preceding the appointment.

This is both good and bad news. It demonstrates that companies are willing to do something different in times of crisis. In fact there's more recent evidence that  a crisis disrupts traditional stereotypes of what makes a good leader, favouring female attributes over male. But it's a bit like taking over the controls after the car has been wrecked and Ryan and Haslam  include a note of caution in their paper, saying:

Positions on glass cliffs can be seen as being exceedingly dangerous for the women who hold them. Companies that have experienced consistently bad performance are bound to attract attention to themselves and to those on their boards of directors … In this way, compared to men, women who assume leadership offices may be differentially exposed to criticism and in greater danger of being apportioned blame for negative outcomes that were set in train well before they assumed their new roles.

Ryan & Haslam (2005),The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women Are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions, British Journal of Management.

Why materialism is bad for your marriage

Here’s a quick quiz if you’re married or have a partner:

   How important is having money and lots of things to you?

1.     Not at all important

2.     Quite important

3.     Important

4.     Very important

   How important is having money and lots of things to your partner?

1.     Not at all important

2.     Quite important

3.     Important

4.     Very important

Researchers* asked 1,734 couples in the US this question.

The answers revealed a lot about the state of people’s marriages.

If both partners were materialistic (answering 3 or 4 above) they were likely to have a rocky relationship. If both partners answered 1 or 2 their marriage was much more stable and their relationship quality higher.

The researchers concluded that materialism is bad for marriages.

Of course, this is a correlational study so the direction of causality is unknown. Materialism may affect the quality of a marriage, but a bad marriage may also increase materialism.

People in poor marriages probably engage in more compensatory consumption, turning to money and stuff to provide the fulfiment they don’t get from their relationship. I’ve known many women who’ve diverted all their desires into revamping a kitchen or restoring a barn only to discover it was actually their marriage that desperately needed renovation. If only they’d gone to Relate instead of Ikea, they could have saved a fortune and stocked up on happiness instead of granite work-tops.

What more could we possibly want darling?

In the US study 20% of marriages comprised couples who were both materialistic and admitted that money was very important to them. These couples were also better off financially, but their relationships were in a sorry state. Again, there are a multitude of reasons for this. It's easy to imagine the passion-killing effects of over-working to earn more, spending time investing in material things and not in the relationship, and a desperate need to ‘prove’ something to people because of poor self-esteem. 

No-one is saying that poverty makes people happier. Just that money makes poor marriage cement, as this ad in Private Eye years ago demonstrated:

"Spike Milligan would like to meet a rich, well-insured widow - intention: murder,"

Perhaps Spike knew that a relationship based on money wouldn’t work. Not sure we'd recommend his alternative though!

*Jason S. Carroll, Lukas R. Dean, Lindsey L. Call, Dean M. Busby. Materialism and Marriage: Couple Profiles of Congruent and Incongruent Spouses. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 2011; 10 (4): 287 DOI:10.1080/15332691.2011.613306

Why we give our daughters dresses to wear and our sons problems to solve

This week the retailing giant Debenhams revealed that parents spend 20% more on their daughters’ clothes than on their sons'. 

Over the lifetime of childhood that adds up to a lot of pink frocks and sparkly tops. In a report on this for the Daily Mail I was asked the killer question of whether it was nature or nurture. There’s never a simple answer to that question but in this case I plumped for nurture. Look how we still praise girls for looking pretty and comment on their appearance, whereas with boys parents are more likely to get excited when he masters their mobile phone functionality.

Whether or not we know we’re doing it, parents start to treat boys and girls differently in the delivery room. Studies show that parents describe their newborn daughters as more delicate and having finer features than boys, even though gender differences aren’t visible early on. So if you dressed all babies in green (rather than pink or blue) we couldn’t tell which gender they were, with a nappy on of course. (You can fluster adults by handing them a baby and not telling them which sex it is, they really don’t know how to behave).

Later on the difference treatment continues:

·      Parents play more roughly with boy babies than girls.

·      They allow boys to explore more as toddlers.

·      They use more emotion words with girls than boys.

·      They encourage girls more in play that involves domestic themes and dressing up.

These subtle signals create the child’s early gender identity. Girls get more parental and societal approval for ‘looking pretty’, sending the message that what they wear is important to others. As little girls grow, they are socialized to continue to care about their appearance. Society glamorizes the female image and places heavy emphasis on the outward show. I guess that’s why women shop more but it must also subtly skew their aspirations and futures. We buy girls princess outfits and boys get Superman costumes. No wonder only 6% of UK engineers are women (the lowest in the EU) compared to 40% in China (according to the Institute of Technology).

Of course, there will be a myriad of reasons for this difference but spending less of their formative years in dress shops may have had something to do with it. 


I AM CURRENTLY RESEARCHING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN FASHION AND WOMEN'S EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING. THE SURVEY IS OPEN UNTIL THE END OF AUGUST AND ONLY TAKES 5-10 MINUTES TO COMPLETE: PLEASE TAKE PART

Click here to take survey

The future's bright. The future's orange or banana... but not chocolate.

You know you’re into the festive season when you find yourself sitting down to a meal you ordered back in September. 
Often at one of those works ‘dos’ where the restaurant needed the order for your table of 68 people ahead of time.

And you find yourself wistfully wondering ‘Why?’.

Why did I think I would want steamed fish and a side salad, you wonder, as you eye up the juicy roasts, mountains of potatoes and pillow-size yorkshire puds arriving at other tables.

mmm...wish I'd ordered what they've got...

Here's the reason. We all have really good intentions for our future behaviour. But we’re less sensible when it comes to present, on-the-spot desires. That’s the Jekyll and Hyde nature of our Future Self and our Present Self (and the dilemma in the story of Ulysses and the Sirens if you want to get all mythological).

Would you choose a healthy snack or junk food for yourself next week?

In a psychology experiment carried out by Leeds University Business School in 1998 experimenters asked people what snack they would like to have in a week’s time - a banana or a chocolate bar. Most people made a banana their advance choice.


The following week the experimenters returned and offered the same people a snack to have straight away. No mention was made of their previous choice. Most people, especially women, opted for the chocolate.

People are saying ‘at the moment of consumption I can’t resist vices

But some time in the future I’ll have what’s good for me’.

We have difficulty delaying gratification because pleasure-seeking is such a strong motivator of human behaviour. We’re much better at exercising self-control when thinking about the future. But not so good at the moment of choice. 

That’s why we join gyms we don’t go to, and think we will eat healthier food in the future. It’s why half of all people surveyed last year said they would go to church, whereas in fact 90% stayed on the sofa. And why we don't care for the planet as much as we should.

So next time you want to make a sensible economic decision, try to make it ahead of time. 
Because prescriptive savings programmes, like Save More Tomorrow (devised by behaviour economist Richard Thaler and adopted by firms like AXA) are a brilliant idea. 


They capitalise on this natural human tendency by getting people to decide in advance to allocate a portion of their future salary increases towards their retirement savings. 
Consider which you would do:

a) Commit now to putting 10% of a future pay rise towards additional pension or mortgage payments?

Or

b) When you get your next pay rise will you then make those additional contributions?

Healthy diet and healthy finance decisions have a lot in common! Pass me the chocolate.