Blue is Green (Er, the other green)

The notion that “misery is not miserly” is by no means unfamiliar to veteran advertising and marketing executives, and it’s really no surprise in a culture that “buys to feel better.” Consider the old, “you deserve a break today” slogan, for example.

Even so, a new study found a great willingness to spend loosely when people are sad, particularly when their sadness triggers feelings of self absorption, according to reports on the research by AP. The study involved two groups: one that watched an emotional video about the death of a boy’s mentor and another that watched an emotionally neutral video on the Great Barrier Reef. Researchers from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities measured the “self-focus” response by counting how frequently study participants used references to "I," "me," "my" and "myself" in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally, although we don’t see how one could write “personally” about anything without using those words.

Nonetheless, on average, the group that watched the sad video was willing to pay four times as much for an insulated water bottle than the group that watched the nature video. Specifically, the 33 young adults in the study were given $10 for participating and then were offered a chance to trade some of the money to buy the water bottle. The sad group offered to trade an average of $2.11 for the bottle compared to 56 cents offered by the neutral group. And despite the difference in willingness to spend, participants in the sad group usually insisted that the video’s emotional content didn’t impact their spending decisions, say the researchers.

Here’s a bit from the AP story that hit the wires over the weekend:


"This is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness," Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor who studies emotion and decision making, said in a phone interview. "This is really different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping. People have no idea this is going on."

The researchers concluded sadness can trigger a chain of emotions leading to extravagant tendencies. Sadness leads people to become more focused on themselves, causing the person to feel that they and their possessions are worth little. That feeling increases willingness to pay more — presumably to feel better about themselves.

"Because the study used real commodities and real money, results hold implications for everyday decisions," according to the authors of the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, and presented Saturday at a meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.


We are not really sure how outdoor companies can use this information, or how anyone would promote sadness when selling “recreation,” but it might be fun to consider …