An Research About The Influence Mechanism Of College Students' Subjective Social Class On Conspicuous Consumption

The people in different subjective social class have different psychological characteristics.Compared with the objective social class,the subjective social class has a far-reaching impact on people.Individuals with low social class are at the bottom of society.They lack adequate material information and social resources.They are unable to determine their own living conditions and social identity.They also appear to be more self-deplorable,more vulnerable and less controllable.Although they have little income,they are willing to spend more money on conspicuous consumption,but their motives for conspicuous consumption are diverse.There are two main types of conspicuous consumption motivation: social consumption motivation and personal consumption motivation.Social consumption motivations mainly include: face,followers,snobbery,uniqueness,dependence on others,gift consumption,and status symbols;personal consumption motivations mainly include: hedonism,perfectionism,self-gifting,and performance intrinsic self.You will find that the purpose of consumption is no longer limited to the practical functions of the commodity.After the discussion of the above-mentioned so many conspicuous consumption motivations,we can find that most of the motivations are to meet one's own psychological needs,social needs or individual needs,and very few are for the function of the goods themselves.Self-affirmation allows participants to maintain their self-integrity by affirming their own values in other areas.If self-affirmative manipulation can maintain the self as a whole,then individuals can reduce unreasonable conspicuous consumption to compensate for their own lack of psychological needs.The study designed three studies,respectively,to explore the relationship between the sense of control in the subjective social class and conspicuous consumption;conspicuous consumption of different levels of control;and self-affirmation of the impact of low subjective social class subjects.In study 1,205 subjects were selected and their subjective social class,control and conspicuous consumption were measured by questionnaires.Then,to explore the mediating effect of sense of control between subjective social class and conspicuous consumption.In study 2,91 subjects were selected.This study adopted two factors inter-test design(high subjective social class,low subjective social class)×(high sense of control,low sense of control).After subjective social class and the sense of control were started,then the influence of subjective social class and the sense of control on conspicuous consumption was investigated.In Study 3,100 subjects were selected.This study adopted two factors inter-test design(high subjective social class,low subjective social class)×(self-affirmation,no-affirmation)to explore the role of self-affirmation in adjusting the willingness to pay for conspicuous consumption of different subjective social class.The dependent variable in the experiment was the participant's willingness to pay for an Adidas T-shirt with status value and brand value.If subjects with a low subjective social class have a higher willingness to pay,we can understand that subjects of low subjective social class prefer using conspicuous consumption behavior to compensate for the lack of sense of control.In this way,the conspicuous consumption is also A compensatory consumption.After three studies,we got the following conclusions:In study 1,sense of control has partial mediation effect between the subjective social class and conspicuous consumption.In study two,no matter whether it is a high subjective social class start-up group or a low subjective social class start-up group,there is no significant difference inconspicuous consumption between high sense of control and low sense of control.In study 3,for the low subjective social class start-up group,participants who had no self-affirmation had significantly higher willingness to pay for conspicuous consumption than self-affirmation group.For the high subjective social class start-up group,participants who had no self-affirmation had no significant difference with self-affirmation group participants in willingness to pay for conspicuous consumption.