Thoughts of death appear to trigger retail therapy or comfort buying in people with low self esteem.

Naomi Mandel at Arizona State University and Dirk Smeesters at Erasmus University,  Rotterdam explored the link between thoughts of mortality and the urge to consume by asking 746 students to write essays on one of two topics: their death or a visit to the dentist. Each student  also completed a questionnaire designed to evaluate their level of self-esteem.

Mandel and Smeesters found that subjects with low self-esteem who wrote about death ate more cookies, when given the opportunity, and bought more items from a hypothetical shopping list compared to those who wrote about the dentist. In people with high self-esteem, thoughts of death had little effect (Journal of Consumer Research, DOI: 10.1086/587626).

They concluded that people with low self-esteem use consuming as a way of subconsciously escaping self-awareness, which is heightened by thoughts of dying. "When you indulge in shopping or eating, it helps you forget yourself," says Smeesters.

Rosellina Ferraro at the University of Maryland says the study is interesting in that it suggests a "possible mechanism for dealing with death-related anxiety", (.. maxxing out the credit cards?..) adding that triggers for thinking about death are everywhere in the culture particularly in news coverage.

In his latest, still unpublished study, Smeesters found that people with low self-esteem shop and eat more after watching death-related news clips . He adds "One would hope that companies do not exploit this by putting food ads straight after the news."

Well you can bet they will now they know there are sound economic reasons for doing so...maybe the corporates could even  fund a few more large body count  disasters..a sort of proactive top down consumerist take on  karma..

whatever, I'm off to buy myself a new outfit to avoid dwelling on my own mortality 

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