The Influence Of Attribution Style On The Implicit Attitude Of Conspicuous Consumption In Frustration Situation

Conspicuous consumption is a behavior which means an individual purchases expensive,extravagant and rare items or services in order to satisfy his own psychological needs in order to show himself to other members of society.Existing studies have shown that conspicuous consumption has become an important means for individuals to compensate for certain internal needs.Generally,individuals used to finding the reasons when encountering frustration situations in daily life,different individuals have different attribution styles and different inner needs caused by frustration.Previous research has found that when faced with obstacles and challenges,individuals with an optimistic attributional style can cope with setbacks better and need less external wealth to maintain their self-worth.While when individuals feel self-doubt,they will increase their self-worth,maintain their status,and reduce their sense of uncertainty by acquiring material wealth from the outside world.In addition,some studies have found that individuals who attribute events to external causes have happened are more likely to make conspicuous consumption.Besides,materialism is considered to be an important influencing factor of individual conspicuous consumption,individuals with higher materialism are more inclined to make conspicuous consumption.Existing researches also show that materialism has a compensating effect on individual self-esteem,self-worth,and well-being.Attribution tends to external control,and individual who has a lower control over the occurrence of events tend to have a high level of materialism.As a special group of consumers,college students have no specific economic income,while it is not uncommon for college students to meet their own consumer desires with campus loans.University period is an important stage in the formation of individual personality and cognitive processes,it is important to help students grow up healthy by guiding students to form a correct value on consumption and values,reducing campus loan incidents.Under such a circumstance,This study starts with attribution styles which closely related to individual personality and cognitive processes,investigating whether the attributional style of college students can affect the individual's implicit attitude towards conspicuous consumption by affecting their level of materialism in a frustrated situations.The first research adopts the pre-test and post-test design of the experimental group and the control group,taking 68 undergraduates as subjects to explored whether induced the failure ability test can effectively induce the frustration of subjects.The experimental group used 9 difficult questions from the Danish Mensa Authority IQ test as frustration context-inducing materials for the test task,and the control group used 30 neutral emotional words as materials for the recognition task.Then used covariance analysis,and the result showed that different types of treatments have a significant effect on the emotions of frustration,after excluding the effects of pre-test emotions,the frustration mood in the experimental group was significantly higher than that in the control group.It is concluded that this method of failure-induced ability test can effectively create frustration situations in the laboratory.In the second research,the relationship between attributional style and implicit attitudes to conspicuous consumption and the mediating role of materialism in the process of attribution influence implicit attitudes to conspicuous consumption through the establishment of frustration situations by using both experimental methods and questionnaires were explored.In order to measure the implicit attitude of conspicuous consumption,this study accorded to previous research,collected the implicit association test attribute words and concept words with two semi-closed and closed questionnaires were designed to conduct surveys among college students respectively,then designed corresponding experimental procedures experiment.Took several university students of Nanjing as test subjects,finally,204 copies of data were gotten,and 190 copies were left after excluding invalid data.The data samples were analyzed by Bootstrap method of Amos software,and the result show that in the frustration situation,college students' attributional styles can reversely predict the level of materialism and the implicit attitude of conspicuous consumption.The level of materialism can positively predict the implicit attitude of conspicuous consumption,and materialism plays a part of mediating role in the relationship between attribution style and implicit attitude of conspicuous consumption.Female college students have a higher material pursuit than male college students,while the attributional style of graduate students is more optimistic than that of undergraduates.And it has the following conclusions: Individuals with an optimistic attribution style have a low level of materialism,which leads to their negative attitude towards conspicuous consumption.The intervention can guide students to optimistic and positive attribution when they face frustrating situations,which can reduce the individual's internal needs through external material pursuits,decrease the level of individual materialism,finally reduce the individual's positive attitude towards conspicuous consumption and reducing conspicuous consumption behavior.