The Study On Frugality Values Of Chinese

Frugality is a set of values about resource using and satisfaction of desires, characterized by the lifestyle which consumers are both restrained in acquiring and in resourcefully using economic goods and services to achieve longer-term goals, which may be economical, environmental, cultural, or spiritual, other than the mere pursuit of immediate satisfaction through spending, consumption or possession. Frugality is rooted deep in our human past. In times of scarcity, frugality ensures individual physical survival. In era of plenty, frugality aids in psychological survival, by helping people avoid failing into unfulfilling and relentless pursuits of satisfaction to the material desires. A wealth of researches suggested that under the right conditions, frugality provided a number of financial and psychological benefits to its practitioners. There seem to be no attenuation of frugality with the development of modern society and productivity. On the one hand, frugality has been playing an important role of social ethical norms:to individuals, for self-cultivation and managing to get along in the world, what is considered to be most important is being frugal and humble; to governors, frugality works as criteria for governance and specific measures for promoting social harmony. On the other hand, frugality provides a basic strategy to deal with resource issues:as sustainable development has become a consensus of the international community, frugality is not only a compatible values, but also a indispensable basic virtue for coordination of intergenerational relations and achieving intergenerational equity. But so far, frugality has been still little-studied. A review of frugality on multi-disciplinary literatures revealed neglect, and broadening the search to the field of psychology is no more fruitful. Therefore, this thesis began with a review of these literatures and then reported findings from qualitative research, set out from Chinese traditional culture and current status of social life, forming an operational definition of frugality. Then, we reported a four-study program of empirical research designed to develop and evaluate the measurement of frugality, to classify different types of frugal individuals, to find out the implicit traits and mechanism of frugality working as values. Finally, the contents of this thesis were concluded, the innovation and shortages were pointed out and several proposals for the future research were put forward.Study 1, development of frugality scale. In the conceptual framework of values, this indigenous study developed and evaluated a multi-item scale of frugality with the sample of Chinese adults. The final thirty-item scale had eight factors, grouped into two subscales named frugality motivation and behavioral strategies respectivly. The motivation subscale of frugality included three factors named copying survival stress, enhancement of material well-being and value transcendence. It speaked to the questions of why people engage in thrift, in increasingly wealthy, choice-abundant consumer societies. The first factor refered to the motivation of frugality, which might be some kind of ’choice’ or ’necessity’. The others considered the interplay between the categories of ’material’ and’spirit’ aspects of frugality in respect to values shapped the frugal practice. The behavioral strategies subscale was composed of five dimensions: planning carefully, using wisely, satisfyed restrictly, identify with frugality and enjoy being frugal. This subscale addresses capabilities and strategies of being frugal, which can be located and discussed somewhere between ’low’ and ’high’ competence, and the beliefs and emotional attitudes toward frugal behavior and lifestyle. The motivation and behavioral strategies of frugality form a complete concept system of frugality, which is organized by a bi-factor structure. The frugality scale has a replicable multi-dimensional factor structure, reasonable internal consistency reliability, discriminant validity, incremental validity and replicable nomological validity. Beyond desirable measurement qualities, frugality is shown to be empirically useful for understanding Chinese consuming behaviors.Study 2, the latent structure analysis of frugality. The scores on frugality scale constitute the profile of individual faith-behavioral system of frugality, reflecting the overall situation of their frugal values. We used latent profile analysis to test numbers of frugality types and their characters with the same samples as study 1. Four LPA (with 3-6 categories) were carried out with 8 dimension scores of frugality scale as indicators. The LPA results can calculate a five-type model from the measured data, which was the optimal fitting one. It showed that the frugality could be classified into five major types, namely, copying group, enhancement group, transcendence group, middle group and thriftless group. The external performances of the first three groups were similar, being frugal. But the copying group was forced to behave frugally, it’s not real frugality. In contrast, the enhancement and transcendence groups were actively choosing to live thrifty, who had the values of frugality. Characters of the five types are consistent with the hypothesis; and there are group differences in the materialism and subjective well-being.Study 3, the implicit frugality and its properties. This study used the theory and research methods of implicit social cognition, with experimental paradigms of PDP and GNAT, to carry out two experiments for the research purposes, proving that there were two separate levels of individual frugality and describing their properties. The results showed that there were two separate information extraction process in person’s frugality, which means that there are implicit and explicit frugality as a kind of values. Overall, participations had positive implicit attitude towards the frugal word, the evaluation of individual implicit frugality values was prone to positive. But there were significant differences on the implicit attitude in different frugality groups. Transcendence group had the most positive implicit attitude toward frugality, that of enhancement group was more neutral, and copying group was relatively negative. The results from the explicit frugality survey and implicit frugality experiments supported each other, indicating the validity of frugality scale and implicit experiment designs, and providing empirical data support for the frugality categorical assumption.Study 4, the mechanism of frugality. We explored psychological variables and their mechanism in process of evaluation and expression of frugality values. Through priming participants’ different evaluation frames (moral evaluation vs. utilitarian evaluation), we tested the specific ways people used in the value evaluation stage of frugality. Moral and utilitarian priming would significantly improve the level of participants’ frugal behavior. The enhancement group was more sensitive to utilitarian words, but enhancement group was the moral one. This indicated that people used more than one way during the evaluation of frugality, just varying degrees of different evaluation methods. For further details on the expression of frugality values, a multiple mediating effect model on how frugality values could influence external frugal behaviors through self-control and self-transcendence was built. The results revealed that there were significant positive direct and indirect effects between frugality values and external frugal behaviors. The mediating effects of self-control and self-transcendence were not equal which had statistically significant difference in different frugality groups. For the enhancement group, self-transcendence took the major role in the expression of frugal values, but self-control did that for enhancement group.Finally, implications for theoretical and practical were explored. Series empirical results of these studies, which involved the structure, types, implicit properties and mechanisms, enriched the understanding of frugality. And that indicated the frugality is a phased and integrated system. The "phased" means the formation and development of frugality could be divided into different stages, from being forced to behave thriftily to the internalization of the frugality values. The "integrated" refers that frugality is not only reacting to external environment, but also the internal needs of individuals; the valuation of frugality is both cost-benefit balance and moral judgment; and the expression of it take both self-control and self-transcendence as mediators, and the limitations and future research issues were discussed. In future, the cognitive and neural mechanism of frugality could be explored in the aspects of structure and functions; the viable strategies for cultivation frugality values should be developed to promote individual well-being and improve natural and social environment. In addition, we can also make the further research to time, emotion and other fields.