| Since the reform and opening up,with the rapid and steady development of China’s economy and society,the development trend of people’s consumption concepts for goods and services has been diversified.With the development of the Internet,foreign concepts and customs have impacted the thinking of college students in the new era,and there have been unhealthy consumption phenomena that do not meet the needs of college students,such as conspicuous consumption.In the past,most research has studied conspicuous consumption from a material perspective.It is of great importance to give ideological guidance to college students as they are still semi-social individuals whose mental development has not yet fully matured.Therefore,this study explored the psychological mechanism of conspicuous consumption and put forward some suggested solutions for college students’ ideological education based on this psychological mechanism.Previous studies have proved that social comparison affects conspicuous consumption,but the internal mechanism has not been fully explored.Based on this,this study intends to initially construct a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship between social comparison and conspicuous consumption,and the influence mechanism of jealousy and relative deprivation,and validate the model through two sub-studies.The first study is a correlational study that explores the relationship between social comparison,conspicuous consumption,envy and relative deprivation through a questionnaire survey.A total of 641 valid samples were obtained by testing students in five different colleges and universities in Chengdu.With the aid of the Social Comparison Tendency Scale,the Conspicuous Consumption Scale,the Jealousy Tendency Scale,and the Relative Deprivation Scale,the influence of social comparison on conspicuous consumption and its mechanism of action were preliminarily explored.The second study is an experimental study,taking college students as the research object to further test the relationship between social comparison direction and conspicuous consumption.In the experiment,151 subjects were selected;a single-factor between-subject design was used to manipulate the subjects’ social comparison direction through written materials;the Conspicuous Consumption Scale used in the first study was utilized to measure the subjects’ conspicuous consumption tendency.Upon the completion of the above two studies,the final conclusions of this study are drawn as follows:(1)Social comparison tendency has a significant positive predictive effect on conspicuous consumption;(2)The social comparison tendency partly influences conspicuous consumption behaviors through jealousy,and the relationship between social comparison and conspicuous consumption is moderated by the sense of relative deprivation.(3)The direction of social comparison has an impact on conspicuous consumption,and upward social comparison will produce a higher tendency to conspicuous consumption;(4)The social comparison direction partly influences conspicuous consumption behavior through jealousy,but the relationship between the social comparison direction and the conspicuous consumption is not regulated by the sense of relative deprivation. |
