Thaindian News

London, May 6 (IANS) People feeling low after a rebuke or threat at the workplace often shop for expensive, luxurious items, paying with their credit cards.

This sense of hurt prompts them to restore their self worth by purchasing high status items, says a new study by Niro Sivanathan of the London Business School and Nathan Pettit of Cornell University in the US.

They examined whether people might be more likely to use a credit card when feeling down and out, reports the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

They had people work on an ambiguous computer test, and then told half of them that their “spatial reasoning and logic ability was in the 12th percentile,” a jargonistic way of telling them they are not very smart.

They told the other half that they were in the 88th percentile, a perfectly fine performance, according to a statement of the London school.

When asked how they might pay for “a consumer product that you have been considering purchasing”, people who had had their ego bruised were substantially more likely to say they were planning on paying on credit.

In a follow-up, Sivanathan and Pettit asked 150 college students to think about buying a pair of jeans. Half were told to consider a pair of exclusive, high status designer jeans, while the rest were told to think about normal everyday jeans.

The students then went through the same computer test and were told they had done poorly or well.

The self esteem threat made people willing to pay almost 30 percent more for the luxury jeans and were more than 60 percent more likely to intend to purchase the jeans with a credit card.