The Influence Of Consumer Sentiment And Cognitive Demand On Irrational Consumption Behavior

Since Daniel Kahneman and Tversky put forward the theory of expectation theory, more and more scholars began to study the irrational purchase decision-making behavior of the consumers. Many scholars have repeatedly verified the bounded rationality of consumers during their purchasing decisions. The bounded rationality theory insists that “totally rationality”, which is the basis of classical rational model, does not exist in reality. Purchasing actions of decision makers is not only depends on time, information, technology, and other external factors, but also depends on psychological elements of decision makers themselves. In recent years, some scholars have been studying on how consumer’s sentiment or cognitive ability influences their purchasing behaviors. Therefore, this article will start with the concept of irrational buying decisions, then find out the different types of irrational purchasing behavior, and to further explore the interaction between cognitive abilities and personal emotion during the buying behavior.Based on the theoretical discussion, this article presents some assumptions and issues, and try to verify these hypotheses by empirical and experimental methods. The hypotheses are as follows:1. Emotion has a significant influence on individual irrational consumption behavior.2. Need of Cognition has a significant influence on individual irrational consumption behavior.3. Individual emotion and need of cognition has a significant interaction on irrational consumption behavior.According to this hypothesis, this paper adopts two parts of research to validate. This article studies a part for the empirical part, recruited 218 participants, including 89 men and women to 129.The participants, 96 people aged 18 to 24, 25 to 30 subjects for 95 people, 31 years old and over was a total of 27 people. A total of 177 participants gained the bachelor’s degree. Participants in the survey were not only for students, there are some people in the society, its wide coverage. Empirical part of the research through the questionnaire survey form, scale for has been adopted by the psychological educational world widespread use "cognitive demand scale" scale, and to develop consumer behavior scale.And this article second part is experimental study part, is based on voluntary recruited subjects took a 2*3 groups design way to measure the irrational consumption behavior. Participants will receive first cognitive demand scale test, according to the score will be divided into high need for cognition group and low need for cognition. Then, the two groups of participants will be randomly assigned to three emotional group for emotional arousal. Finally, through the choices participants before and after the emotional arousal differences in results to determine the occurrence of irrational consumption behavior. The experiments of recruiting participants were 198.The graduate student 64, 134 undergraduate students. Subjects, the boy a total of 87 people, a girl of 111.Eliminate emotional arousal failure of 20 subjects, collecting valid subjects were 178.The empirical study found that people with higher cognitive ability will make more rational spending decisions than those people which with lower cognitive ability. And people with higher cognitive ability have less influence under external factors. At the same time, a high degree of cognitive populations affected by emotional factors also below the lower cognitive crowd. Students are more likely to be affected by external factors and emotional factors. Level of education and the level of irrational consumer behavior negatively correlated. However, with the influence of external and emotional factors, the level of education did not show significant differences.