A study from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities shows that sadness makes us spend more and even waste money .
To demonstrate this, the study authors worked with around thirty volunteers divided into two groups. While half of them were watching a video about an extremely sad story, the rest of the participants were watching a film about coral reefs in Australia. The researchers then offered the participants a bottle of water without setting the price, and found to their surprise that the first group paid up to 4 times more for the product than their peers. Yet despite the huge difference, those "sad" buyers flatly denied that the emotional content of the video had influenced their willingness to pay more.
According to the researchers, sadness encourages people to focus more on themselves, making them feel that both they and their possessions are worth very little. And that feeling increases the willingness to spend more to feel better , although in a totally unconscious way.
The study has been presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
