The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Hedonism or quality? What drives luxury purchases Posted: 14 Feb 2013 05:59 AM PST  When it comes to splurging on luxury products, the French aim for exclusivity while Americans buy to feel good. — shutterstock.com pic American consumers tend to buy expensive items for hedonistic purposes, or to feel good about themselves rather than to please others, says head researcher Jaehee Jung. To reach those conclusions, the team surveyed university students about their motives, finding that many responded positively to statements such as "pleasure is all that matters." Quality of luxury items wasn't as much of a concern. Perhaps under the influence of American consumerism, Brazilian and Indian students perceived luxury in the same way. Germans, however, are more focused on function, placing emphasis on quality standards over prestige, as do Italians, Hungarians, and Slovakians. However, French students said that they value luxury items because of the expense and exclusivity. French subjects responded positively to statements such as "true luxury products cannot be mass produced" and "few people own a true luxury product." "Many luxury goods originate in France," Jung adds. "Cultural heritage and pride might have made them feel luxury is not for everyone." The findings appear in the journal Psychology & Marketing. Access: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.20583/abstract — AFP-Relaxnews |
| Single or married? Either way, you’re probably satisfied with it, says study Posted: 14 Feb 2013 02:52 AM PST  Whether you're single or married, happy or unhappy, most people are positively biased toward their current relationship status, a new study says. — shutterstock.com pic What that boils down to, researchers say, is married couples feeling sad for their lonely single friends, while singles in turn pity their coupled friends' loss of freedom. "We often become evangelists for our own lifestyles," the researchers say. "When it comes to our relationship status, we are rarely content to simply say 'being single works for me' or 'being in a relationship suits my disposition.'" Rather, people may idealize their own relationship status, perhaps as a way of coping with the aspects of it that aren't that ideal, they noted. To reach their findings, researchers Kristin Laurin of Stanford University and David Kille and Richard Eibach of the University of Waterloo tested 458 adults ranging in age from 18 to 79 in four separate experiments. The first showed that the more stable participants considered their relationship status to be, the more they "idealized that status as a norm for others to follow," they said. This was true for both singles and coupled subjects, regardless of whether or not they were happy with their status. For their second study, the team asked subjects to imagine a Valentine's Day evening for an imaginary person of the same gender, named Nicole or Nick. Subjects who judged their own relationship status to be stable thought that Nicole/Nick would have a better Valentine's Day if she or he had the same status as them. However, the subjects had less positive judgments when Nicole/Nick's relationship status was different from theirs. The findings, announced Monday, will appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. — AFP-Relaxnews |
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