Consumers’ Self-Control Failure

By Jay Zheng

Consumers’ Self-Control Failure

The article “Yielding to Temptation: Self‐Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior” is about shopper’s self-control and its failures to consumer behavior. The author believes that purchasing product will bring shoppers true happiness.  From the article, the author believes that “self-control is depending on the standards, monitoring process and the capacity to alter the self, if any of these fails, self-control can be undermined”. (Baumeister)

Standards refer to goals that specify the desired response, such as the dieter’s goal is having an ideal weight or shape body, however, to achieve this goal, the dieter will have to spend more money on healthy food and others, therefore, the goal of having better body will conflict with the goal of saving money. Normally, people control themselves to pursue higher standards, but when they are emotionally upset, they will abandon the standards and ignore the self-control, such as eating unhealthy food or purchasing goods to make self feels better.  

Monitoring process is that people keep track the relevant behaviors, and self-control breaks down if people lose tracking their behaviors. For example, dieters keep track how much calories food they eat and how much exercise they do every day so that they could have a better body. If they stop tracking, self-control will break down and they will eat more calories food and stop doing exercise. Same as consuming behavior, if people keep track of their money just like how dieters track their food, impulsive purchases are less likely.

The capacity to alter the self is about how much people could handle to resist the temptation to buy. For example, a dieter can only eat healthy food, after a while, he is no longer able to control himself from the tasty unhealthy food, he gives up dieting. Same as purchasing, people enter the store just for one thing, but he could not resist the temptation of other stuffs. As the result, he bought more than he needs. Indeed, the shopping list could keep people from impulse purchasing, and reduce the chances of spending too much.

Whether consumers’ self-control will break down or not, depends on the standards, the monitoring process and the capacity to alter self. “For consumer behavior, self-control represents the capacity to resist temptation.”  (Baumeister) If people could not resist the temptation of buying, their self-control will fail and they will become unsatisfied and unhappy consumers.   

Consumers’ self-control is the ability to control their emotion, behavior and desire from purchasing, if their self-control fails, consumer will spend more money with things that they don’t really want or need. Self-control is important to every single consumer, and every consumer should know how to avoid self-control failure.   

Roy F. Baumeister, “Yielding to Temptation: Self‐Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior”, Journal of Consumer Research, The University of Chicago Press, Vol. 28, No. 4 (March 2002), pp. 670-676

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338209