Buy More If You Can’t Control It

Social exclusion is a common phenomenon in modern society.When people are ostracized by society,a series of subtle psychological changes take place in their attitudes and behaviors.At present,many scholars in the field of marketing have conducted in-depth discussions on the relationship and mechanism between social exclusion and some specific consumption behaviors,such as conspicuous consumption,conformity consumption,and nostalgic consumption.This paper focuses on another increasingly common consumption behavior,consumer hoarding,and attempts to explore the influence of social exclusion on consumer hoarding tendency and the underlying mechanism through empirical research,so as to enrich the theoretical achievements in this field.In this paper,three experiments were conducted to verify our theoretical model: Experiment 1 proves the positive effect of social exclusion on hoarding tendency,that is,compared with individuals with low social exclusion degree,consumers with high social exclusion degree will have higher hoarding tendency.Experiment 2 further proves that the positive effect of social exclusion on consumers’ hoarding tendency is due to the lack of individual’s sense of control.Specifically,social exclusion reduces the individual’s sense of control,which leads to consumers’ tendency to hoard more goods when consuming.Experiment 3 proves that the positive influence of social exclusion on hoarding tendency is regulated by the individual’s self-consciousness.Specifically,compared with the individual with low self-consciousness,consumers with high self-consciousness are more sensitive to the perception of social exclusion and their sense of control decreased even more,so they also show a higher hoarding tendency.