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Your brain is conned to spend, spend, spend. Here's how to take back control
We really should know better. Despite the neon-lit fact that we're in the depths of the credit crunch, official figures show that last month we splurged on shoes and clothes, spending about 9 per cent more than this time last year. Why is it so hard to restrain our retail urges? A new study helps to confirm that when we're shopping, our brains are not our own. We might think we are in control, but in fact the big levers are grabbed by our primitive drives.
Worse, the marketing industry has spent billions scientifically perfecting ways to hijack your hyper-emotional primordial circuits into buying stuff that your sensible higher brain knows you don't need or particularly want. The good news is that much of this research can be turned on its head - instead of bamboozling our brains into breaking the bank, we can kid our instincts into spending less. Here's how:
Give yourself - and your purse - a break
Pausing briefly between choosing something and taking it to the checkout can dramatically boost the chance of the cash staying in your purse, says a study to be published in December's Journal of Consumer Research. Wendy Liu, of the University of California, Los Angeles, ran four tests where she interrupted people's purchasing. She found that a break in the buying process changed their priorities. Before the interruption, shoppers fixated on whether the object they desired was a bargain. After the interruption, they returned with a far more objective, higher-brained view - did they really want the thing at all?
The need to cool off our consumer brains is reinforced by Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His brain-scan studies show how the feelgood-chemical dopamine is released in waves as shoppers see a product and ponder buying it. But dopamine is all about the hunt, not the trophy: only the anticipation, rather than the buying, squirts the chemical. Once you've sealed the deal, the chemical high dissipates in minutes, often leaving a sense of regret that retailers call “buyer's remorse”. With practice, you can get your hormone kicks from window-shopping: no purchase necessary.
Don't even touch your cards
Four studies on 330 people in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied confirm the suspicion that it is much easier to spend money in the form of a credit card. The New York University-led report concludes that we regard anything but hard cash as “Monopoly play money” and that real currency is the only thing that gives you the “pain of paying”. Credit cards might not only anaesthetise retail pain, they may create a physical craving to get the dopamine high from spending, says Professor Drazen Prelec, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He cautions in Marketing Letters that when you see and touch the plastic it is just like smelling biscuits baking when you are hungry: you feel compelled to splurge to satisfy the craving.
Keep brands out of your brain
Designer brands have proved unprecedentedly effective at persuading you to spend more money on “special” goods that are actually only of average quality. Brands are painstakingly developed to encourage people to identify with them, to believe that their favourite labels have exactly the same human values as they do. A study in the Journal of Advertising Research reveals how our Stone Age brains are built to relate to other people and animals - and this way of relating attaches to inanimate objects, too. We habitually anthropomorphise, which is why many of us call our cars “she” and give them cute names. In similar fashion, we increasingly attribute human-like personality traits to brands.
The research shows that we can even believe that the brand has an attitude towards us, so we develop tight “primary” relationships with it that are on a par with marriage and kinship. So instead of simply choosing between products, subconsciously we think we are picking life partners and powerful new tribes, and that we can buy our way into higher group status.
Don't shop with friends
Jennifer Argo, an assistant professor of marketing at Alberta University's School of Business, realised that whenever she went shopping with a friend, she changed her habits, choosing costlier foods and clothes. Argo employed mystery shoppers to stand by a rack of batteries, and found that their mere presence made the battery buyers pick the most expensive brand. If no one was there, they chose cheaply. The result, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, was consistent in three separate studies. “We will spend more money to maintain our self-image in front of others,” she says. One answer, according to a separate study, may be to shop with your relatives: we buy fewer things when visiting stores under the eagle eyes of family members.
Staying calm costs less
We might be more liable to spree when financially squeezed: under stress we can feel driven to hoard, says a study of students in Behavioural Research Therapy. This might have an evolutionary explanation: getting gripped by the urge to stockpile provisions in times of threat would have helped our ancestors' survival. This residual instinct can also help to explain how sales campaigns may work en masse by collectively preying on our deepest insecurities - you smell bad, you're not good enough, no one likes you.
Be suspicious of special offers
Chainstores love to make you feel that you are getting a generous deal, because this makes you buy more than you need. When you see special offers on the shelves, your rational brain tends to go soppy with thanks and makes you want to return the favour by splashing out on unnecessary items. It's called the “spill-over effect”. Here, at least, it's worth honing your ingratitude.
Think global, feel richer
A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year found that wealthy Londoners no longer feel rich, because they do not mix with less affluent people any more. We need to look wider, to the global neighbourhood. About half of humanity lives on less than £1 a day according to the UN. Meanwhile, a fifth of the Earth's people buy nearly 90 per cent of all the consumer goods. That's us, the stressed guys in the wealthy neighbourhood.
Satisfice yourself
“Satisficing”, in social-science jargon, is the sensibly shod alternative to maximising. When you satisfice, you don't let an impossible quest for the perfect option destroy your enjoyment of the merely OK. The credit crunch is an opportunity to decide that life in the West today, with its unheralded levels of healthcare, home comfort and personal safety, is pretty much as good as it will get, and there is actually no need to try buying more contentment. We just need to convince our primitive brains of this.
