An Exception Proving The Rule? Despite being the undisputed boss of the North Pole, Santa Claus's gift expenses far outweigh the offerings of milk and cookies he is said to receive.
How generous we are when we buy gifts may be tied to how empowered we feel, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
The researchers behind the report say that the more powerful people feel, the less they're likely to spend on others. They did a nice job of summing up their study in its title: "Generous Paupers and Stingy Princes? Power and Consumer Spending."
One of the researchers' tests involved an auction for basic stuff – a t-shirt and a mug – among Northwestern University students who had been assigned "boss" or "employee" roles. And anyone contemplating an exchange of gifts with their boss may want to keep the results in mind.
The students who had been empowered by the researchers bid an average of $7.10 when they were buying the item for someone else. In contrast, people in the "employee" roles bid $10.81.
But when the participants thought they were buying the items for themselves, the scenario flipped — with the empowered bunch paying $12.08, or 46 percent higher than the $6.49 the powerless were willing to spend on themselves.
There's no telling if the new data will change the way retailers use advertising — or how stores train their customer-service folks. Perhaps they could begin asking upfront: "Are you buying this mug for yourself, madam? Or are you getting it for someone else, you scum?"
If it's any consolation to your ideas of human nature, another experiment in the same study, which used chocolate as the purchased item, found that both the "high power" and the "low power" groups felt happier about buying candy for another person. And that suggests, as you likely suspected all along, that maybe it really is the thought that counts.
And if you have a birthday coming up and would like to encourage some big spending among your loved ones — not that a Scorpio would EVER resort to that kind of covert manipulation — here's how the researchers described their methods:
Power was manipulated by assigning people to the role of a boss or employee in a task, having participants recall a past time when they possessed or lacked power, or exposing them to advertisements designed to make them feel powerful or powerless.
You can watch a video of the researchers discussing their work here.
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