Name: Impulse Buying: Why You Buy Stuff You Don't Need
Uploaded: 2023-10-05T03:25:07.000Z
Duration: 6 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You've probably noticed that in a lot of stores,

they make you run through a gauntlet of candy bars,

nail clippers, and phone chargers before you can pay

and make your escape into the outside world.

Maybe you wonder who buys all that stuff.

Or maybe you're already unwrapping a candy bar

Those bins are just one of the tricks retailers use to get you to impulse buy,

where you purchase something without planning for it in advance.

That means you are spending more money than you were originally going to,

so you can see why stores would try so hard to get you to do it.

But whether their tricks work depends a lot on your personality,

and how your brain reacts to perceived gains and losses.

Impulse buyers tend to be impulsive in general, which isn't too surprising.

those that said they were likely to spend a hypothetical windfall impulsively

also reported higher levels of other impulsive behavior,

And a lot of psychologists think these choices

come down to the same thing: a battle between parts of your brain.

activates in proportion to how excited you'll be

It's the same region that activates for what are known as

primary reward drives—things like food and sex.

has a big reaction to something else: the price.

The bigger the price, the more the insula activates.

Psychologists call this reaction the “pain of paying”

because the insula also activates when we expect to be hurt physically,

and when we're exposed to negative things like horrible smells.

Meanwhile, a third region, the mesial prefrontal cortex, also plays a role—

it, too, reacts to the price, activating when you think

Researchers are able to do a pretty good job

predicting whether someone will make a purchase

by comparing activation in these three regions.

But not everyone's brain reacts the same way to the same deal,

which has led some psychologists to think that

we all fall on a spectrum of "pain of paying”—

basically, how much spending money bothers us.

On one end are the spendthrifts, who just don't really feel that pain.

They think nothing of spending some extra money if they've got it.

who will wait until the last minute to pull out their wallets,

for them, the pain of paying is more like the agony of paying.

I sweat, I get hot, I get—my armpits go.

It's, like, the least comfortable I ever am.

Spendthrifts are naturally impulsive buyers,

and not necessarily because they have more money to spend.

those at the spendthrift end of the spectrum had more credit card debt.

But even though tightwads don't like spending money,

they're more vulnerable to certain types of tricks

designed to get them spending money they don't intend to.

that reduces their intense pain of paying.

ploys to reduce pain don't work as well on them.

researchers asked 538 college students if they were

willing to pay a five dollar fee to get overnight delivery on a new purchase.

But for half the people, they called it the "small five dollar fee"

That one word didn't matter to the spendthrifts at all—

about the same amount paid the fee either way.

made the tightwads feel much better about paying the price—

about three times as many thought that it was worth it

Excuse me, I have to go make some changes to DFTBA.com.

Other research has found a similar effect with using credit cards,

which are thought to reduce the pain of paying by keeping the actual,

physical money out of sight and out of mind.

In a shopping study on 125 students, paying by credit card instead of cash

didn't affect the spendthrifts' buying behaviors at all,

but tightwads were more willing to spend money

Those candy bar displays don't really reduce the pain of paying in any way,

so they're probably not the type of trick

that will get the tightwads spending more.

But sticking a bunch of tempting chocolate

in front of the spendthrifts passing through?

Your spending habits may also be influenced

whether you're what psychologists call a "maximizer" or a "satisficer."

For maximizers, decision making is never easy.

If a maximizer needs a new computer, for example,

they might open up a spreadsheet, and find all the computers on the market,

and start listing things like price, processor speed, hard drive capacity.

They're gonna watch a bunch of YouTube videos

on a bunch of different YouTube channels.

They'll weigh everything that might be important

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Impulse Buying: Why You Buy Stuff You Don't Need

stuff

stick

bunch

trait