Thomas C. O'Guinn

Compulsive Buying: A Phenomenological Exploration

Compulsive buying is framed within the larger category of compulsive consumption, and both quantitative and qualitative data are used to provide a phenomenological description. Results indicate people who buy compulsively are more likely to demonstrate compulsivity as a personality trait, have lower self-esteem, and are more prone to fantasy than more normal consumers. Their primary motivation appears to be the psychological benefits derived from the buying process itself rather than from the possession of purchased objects. Consequences of compulsive buying include extreme levels of debt, anxiety and frustration, the subjective sense of loss of control, and domestic dissension.

A Clinical Screener for Compulsive Buying

Advancements in understanding problematic behaviors require the ability to identify affected or at-risk individuals. This article reports the development of a scale to identify compulsive buyers. Seven items representing specific behaviors, motivations, and feelings associated with buying significantly contributed to correctly classifying approximately 88 percent of the subjects. Evidence indicates this screening scale is undimmed and possesses good reliability. Validity is demonstrated by comparing members of a general consumer sample who are identified as compulsive buyers by the screener with self-identified compulsive buyers and noncompulsoriness consumers on several established correlates and outcomes of compulsive buying. Evidence of external validity using a separate sample is also presented. Copyright 1992 by the University of Chicago.

The Role of Television in the Construction of Consumer Reality

This article presents the results of a two-study inquiry into a particular type of consumer socialization: the construction of consumer social reality via exposure to television. In study 1, estimates of the prevalence of products and activities associated with an affluent lifestyle were positively related to the total amount of television respondents watched. The amount of television viewing was shown to function as a mediating variable between the demographic variables income and education and the affluence estimates. In study 2, which consisted of student participants who were either very heavy or very light soap opera viewers, heavy viewers again provided higher estimates of the prevalence of the same types of products and behaviors measured in study 1. In addition, heavy soap opera viewers constructed their estimates significantly faster than light viewers, which suggests that relevant information is more accessible in memory for heavy viewers than light viewers. The results are consistent with heuristic processing strategies, particularly the availability heuristic, in which individuals infer prevalence from the ease of retrieval of relevant examples (Tversky and Kahneman 1973).

The Effects of Television Consumption on Social Perceptions: The Use of Priming Procedures to Investigate Psychological Processes

Two studies investigated the extent to which heavy television viewing affects consumers perceptions of social reality and the cognitive processes that underlie these effects. Both studies found evidence heavy viewers beliefs about social reality are more consistent with the content of television programming than are those of light viewers. The use of a priming methodology provided support for the notion that television is a causal factor in the formation of these beliefs and that a failure to discount television-based exemplars in forming these beliefs accounts for its influence. Implications of these results for a heuristic processing model of television effects are discussed. Copyright 1998 by the University of Chicago.

Heaven on Earth: Consumption at Heritage Village, USA

Heritage Village, home of the PTL ministry, is the focus for a study of consumer behavior involving an explicit synthesis of worship and shopping. The present investigation seeks to better understand the way these pursuits, seemingly philosophically opposed, are brought together for joint consumption. Notions of pilgrimage and sacralization of the secular are useful constructs in examining this merger of religion and consumption, but a priori formulations must be modified to more fully explain the behavior of consumers at Heritage Village.

Compulsive consumption and credit abuse

This paper presents evidence of a type of consumption which can be called “compulsive.” It further demonstrates that this type of consumption is related to certain aspects of materialism, but not possessiveness. This suggests that the actual consumption experience may possess aspects akin to those observed in other abusive behaviors, but may be essentially unrelated to desires for material objects for their intrinsic qualities.ZusammenfassungThema des Beitrages ist solches Konsumentenverhalten, das als “zwanghaft” bezeichnet werden kann. Berichtet wird über eine Untersuchung, in der 129 zwanghaft handelnde Konsumenten mit einer gleichgroßen Kontrollgruppe nicht auffälliger Konsumenten verglichen wurden. Dabei zeigte sich, daß zwanghaftes Konsumverhalten zwar mit bestimmten Aspekten materialistischer Einstellungen, nicht jedoch mit Besitzorientierung in Beziehung steht.Das legt die Vermutung nahe, daß aktuelle Konsumerfahrungen ähnliche Eigenschaften haben können wie andere abweichende Verhaltensweisen auch. Sie können deshalb nicht mit dem Wunsch nach materiellen Gütern um ihrer selbst willen erklärt werden.

Processes and Effects in the Construction of Social Reality Construct Accessibility as an Explanatory Variable

This study conceptualizes the cultivation effect in terms of the accessibility of information in memory. Contemporary social cognition research indicates that individuals consistenly use the most accessible information in memory as a basis for a variety of judgments. Consistent with this body of literature, the current study demonstrates that, based on a reaction time task, those subjects who watch comparatively more television not only overestimate frequency or probability but also give faster responses to various types of cultivation questions. These results support the notion that relevant information, presumably “cultivated” from television viewing, is more accessible in memory for heavier viewers, and, consistent with predictions made by the availability heuristic literature, overestimations of frequency or probability are associated with this enhanced accessibility. Moreover, when controlling for speed of response in the correlation between television viewing and social reality estimates, the relationship is diminished or disappears entirely, suggesting that enhanced accessibility of relevant information for heavier viewers can at least partially account for the cultivation effect.

Effect of Media Advertising and other Sources on Movie Selection

,One of the most generally accepted beliefs about movie audiences is that their selection of films is strongly influenced by interpersonal communication.1 Anecdotal evidence is often cited to support this claim. Several movies with extremely small advertising budgets have gone on to become box-office successes, while other movies supported by extensive budgets have failed. The assumption is that wordof-mouth information made the difference and, therefore, interpersonal communication must be more important than massmedia advertising in influencing movie selection decisions. Empirical investigations of the relative influence of different information sources on film selections, however, have been

How Nothing Became Something: White Space, Rhetoric, History, and Meaning

We seek to advance visual theory in the domain of commercial rhetoric (advertising) by demonstrating how objects and symbols derive meaning from their histories. We do this by examining a single visual trope common in advertising, white space. The choice of white space was purposeful in that it is not a picture and its history is both accessible and traceable. Our sociohistorical theory is supported by showing how specific movements and social forces acted upon the meaning of this particular visual rhetorical device and how this meaning is today shared and understood by both producers of ads (ad agency creative directors) and the readers of ads (ordinary consumers). We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this approach to rhetorical and other major theoretical formulations.

Choice in Computer-Mediated Environments

In the last several years, the increased diffusion of computer andtelecommunications technologies in businesses and homes has produced newways for organizations to connect with their customers. These computermediated environments (CMEs) such as the World Wide Web raise new researchquestions. In this paper, we examine the potential research issuesassociated with CMEs in five areas: (1) decision processes, (2) advertisingand communications, (3) brand choice, (4) brand communities, and (5)pricing.