People who are extraverted and low-income buy more luxury items than those who are introverts to compensate for the experience of having a weak financial situation , according to a study carried out by researchers from University College London (United Kingdom) and collected in the journal Psychological Science.
The experts used real-life spending data from UK bank accounts to investigate the spending habits of people with the most and least possible (rich and poor) with different personality types.
According to the study, people who live with low income tend to feel that they belong to a low social status and spend a higher percentage of their total money on goods and services that are perceived as high status by society.
“We have shown that personality appears to be an important factor in how people respond to life with limited resources. We hope that this new association will help us better understand which people may be able to engage in behavior that perpetuates conditions. with financial difficulties “, explains Joe Gladstone, co-author of the work.
Previous research has found that people who are more social and outgoing take great care of their social status, compared to others. This new research shows that when extraverts have lower incomes, they spend proportionally more on ‘status-generating’ goods than introverts with the same income.
“Our study shows that an extroverted personality is a driver for low-income people who buy more luxury items, and this happens to compensate for the perceived low social status that is not perceived as such for introverts, ” says Blaine Landis , co-author of the study.
The study was carried out in collaboration with a multinational bank based in the United Kingdom. They asked customers if they would complete a standard personality questionnaire and have their responses anonymously compared for research purposes with their bank transaction data. Thus, thousands of transactions from 718 clients were analyzed during 12 months.
The results took into account other factors that could influence spending habits, such as age, gender, employment status and whether clients had children.
Spending data for each person was classified into a number of expense categories, from 1 (very low status) to 5 (very high). High-status categories (that is, those with a point average of four or five) included: foreign travel agencies, golf, electronics, and art institutions, while low-status categories focused on discount stores.
Experts have confirmed that the interaction between income and extraversion in predicting luxury goods spending is important and emphasize that, while this is helpful in understanding the relationship, more research is needed to see if the relationship is causal and if the Results are representative of the UK population as an example for the entire planet.
Reference: Joe Gladstone and Blaine Landis, ‘Personality, Income, and Compensatory Consumption: Low-Income Extraverts Spend More on High-Status Goods’ Psychological Science 2017.
