While some people believe they need a good reason to enjoy a special luxury or splurge on something expensive, there really may be no such thing as a guilty pleasure, researchers say.
“Research suggests that consumers are unlikely to indulge themselves when they don’t see good reasons to justify it, yet our findings consistently indicate that consumers’ actual enjoyment of indulgences is independent of justification, in contrast to what consumers believe,” says Norbert Schwarz, a marketing professor at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business who also is affiliated with the Department of Psychology and Institute for Social Research.
Schwarz and colleague Jing Xu, who now teaches at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, reveal their findings from a series of studies that examine whether people really do need a reason to indulge.
The answer? Live it up, go for it, knock yourself out — just don’t overthink it or you may start to feel guilty, the researchers say.
Consistent with prior research, Schwarz and Xu found that consumers expect less enjoyment and more guilt when they indulge themselves without a reason or simply to console themselves for a poor performance.
But their new research suggests that in the actual situation, the reason or lack thereof, has no impact on enjoyment nor does it matter if consumers indulged to console or reward themselves. While indulging, the pleasures capture their attention and the justifications are not on their minds.
Feelings are fleeting, however, and a few days later many people need to rely on reconstructive memory when they think about how they felt during an indulgence, the researchers say. The memories they reconstruct are more in line with expectations than with actual experience. In other words, if consumers believe that they’ll feel guilty for indulging in one of life’s simple pleasures — even if they actually don’t — they may remember that they did.
In their studies, Schwarz and Xu surveyed hundreds of college students on various scenarios of indulgence — with vs. without a reason, as a reward for previous effort vs. as a consolation for poor performance, expectations vs. actual experience vs. recall of experience.
They found that consumers enjoy indulgences just as much when they had a reason for them as when they did not, and regardless of whether they were rewarding themselves for good performance or consoling themselves for a poor performance.
“In combination, our findings suggest that consumers’ beliefs are erroneous,” Schwarz says. “Actual enjoyment is driven by features of the consumption act itself, rather than by consumers’ a priori beliefs. Indulgence is enjoyable independent of the presence or absence of a good justification.”
Results of the research appear in the current issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.
