The Effect Of Guilt On The Hedonic Consumption

According to lots of researches,there are some controversial results of the effect of guilt on the hedonic consumption,that is guilty individual will choose less hedonic consumption,but on the other studies of guilty individual will think that the hedonic consumption will bring much more pleasure,so this study aims to explore influence of guilt on the hedonic consumption and its psychological mechanism.This paper includes three experiments.The results show that:the way of presentation of the hedonic consumption and the guilt have interactive effects on hedonic consumption attitudes.That is,when people is feeling guilt,hedonic consumption presentation will affect the evaluation on hedonic consumption attitude.When the hedonic consumption is presented by the questionnaire,the attitude of its evaluation is significantly lower than that of when the hedonic consumption is the real experience.However,in the neutral emotion group,the differences between the two different ways of hedonic consumption showed no significant difference.At the same time,the moderate effect of guilt proneness is not significant.According to the decision of the double channel model,when the hedonic consumption is presented in the form of questionnaire with different cognitive load condition,cognitive load has significant main effect.No matter guilt or neutral emotion,high cognitive load of the subjects have a significantly lower evaluation of hedonic consumption than that of people in a low cognitive load.The results showed that guilt and hedonic consumption will influence the evaluation of hedonic consumption.Cognitive load is one of the psychological mechanisms that lead to a phenomenon that when people are guilt and hedonic consumption is presented in the form of questionnaire,the evaluation of hedonic consumption is significantly lower than that of the neutral group.