Verified by 
Retail therapy gets a bad rap. Popular press articles lamenting retail therapy as wasteful and ineffective are not in short supply. And when my colleagues and I asked 100 men and women for the first word that comes to mind when hearing “retail therapy,” we were twice as likely to get negative responses (e.g., “nonsense”) than positive responses (e.g., “fun”).
Certainly, as a standing policy (“shop whenever distressed”), retail therapy seems like a bad idea. Compulsive buying is associated with nothing good. But can an occasional episode of retail therapy help to alleviate distress? My colleagues at the University of Michigan, Beatriz Pereira and Katherine Burson, and I are currently addressing this question using laboratory experiments.
Whether or not retail therapy works appears to depend on the type of distress it is meant to heal. Different negative emotions are characterized by different cognitive appraisals about one’s environment. These appraisals can serve as both causes and consequences of emotion. Sadness, more than any other emotion, is associated with a perceived lack of personal control. People who are sad are especially likely to view events in their life as determined by some combination of chance and other people’s desires.
Shopping may help to restore this lost sense of personal control. Shopping is all about choice (where to shop, whether to buy, what to buy), and previous research suggests that exercising choice can enhance one’s sense of control. It stands to reason, then, that shopping may help to alleviate sadness.
We tested this hypothesis by inducing sadness and then manipulating whether or not participants had the opportunity to shop. For example, in one experiment, we made all participants watch a short clip from The Champ that portrays the death of a boy’s mentor. (The Champ may well be the saddest movie in the world. Ricky Schroder, who played the boy, won a Golden Globe.) After participants watched the video, we presented them with a dozen products, including a wine decanter, a board game, and mini-speakers. We randomly assigned participants to “Choosing” or “Browsing” conditions. Choosers were asked to choose, hypothetically, which four products they would most like to buy. Browsers were asked to indicate which four products would be most helpful when traveling. Only some products were appropriate for travel. For example, no one thought that traveling with a wine decanter was a good idea. Choosers, by contrast, were free to select any product, and thus experienced greater autonomy during the task.
Participants rated their emotions at the beginning and end of the experiment. Overall, participants were sadder at the end of the experiment than at the beginning of the experiment (since they had to endure The Champ). However, the increase in sadness was significantly smaller among Choosers than among Browsers. Choosers exerted greater control during the task, which helped to restore some of the control lost while watching the sad clip. Importantly, neither Choosers nor Browsers obtained any new products during the study, suggesting that merely simulating shopping choices may provide some of the same benefits as engaging in actual retail therapy. (Websites that only allow visitors to shop hypothetically seem to capitalize on this insight.)
In another experiment, we found that shopping helped to alleviate sadness, but not anger. Anger is generally associated with a greater sense of human control than is sadness. Other negative emotions associated with a high sense of personal control, such as guilt, are also unlikely to benefit from retail therapy. Additional research is needed to examine the influence of retail therapy on a broad class of negative emotions.
If the benefits of retail therapy boil down to choice, it is worth considering whether other situations that afford opportunities for choice, like rearranging one’s bookshelves, convey similar benefits. They may, but these vehicles for choice may be less tempting than going shopping. This is not necessarily bad: retail therapy may help to alleviate low-control negative emotions like sadness, even if the shopping is hypothetical. Repeatedly engaging in retail therapy, however, may increase one’s debt, jeopardizing the very sense of personal control that shopping was meant to restore.
