Big Five Personality and Different Meanings of Happiness of Consumers

Abstract

IntroductionHappiness is an increasingly important topic worldwide, and many countries are moving their focus of economic policy toward happiness gradually. Unlike in the past, consumers around the world are pursuing happiness rather than just wealth or social status (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Lipovetsky, 2009). Countries are making a variety of efforts at the national level, including introducing a happiness index to find ways of improving quality of life of their citizens (Ura, 2012; Frey, 2008).Beginning from the 1970s, research on happiness has been actively conducted in various academic fields as well, including philosophy, psychology, economics, and sociology. Especially in the field of marketing and consumer behavior, the relationship between consumption and happiness has been firmly established (Myers, 2000; Hsee et al., 2009). Many studies have also attempted to find the characteristics of consumption that can increase consumers' sense of happiness the most. Recently, the importance of experiential consumption such as of cultural and art products is growing along with the improvements in economic and social well-being of people around the world (Carter et al., 2010).Still, research on happiness to date has limitations of being restricted in scope compared with other topics of social science (DeNeve et al., 1998; Mogilner et al., 2010). Among many studies, a notable recent work by Mogilner et al. (2012) showed that the meaning of happiness can vary across individuals, and proposed two different definitions of happiness accordingly. The difference in the definitions was based on different levels of arousal (i.e., high and low levels of arousal of positive affect) that consumers experience, and the authors investigated the effects of the difference on consumer behavior.The present study expands the above-mentioned study in order to enhance the understanding of consumers' definitions of happiness. Specifically, this study aims to test empirically whether personality influences consumers' definitions of happiness. For this, a text mining approach is taken that utilizes psycho-linguistic features of texts. Online blog articles that describe the happy experiences of people are collected and analyzed to see whether the personality characteristics of the texts have significant relationship with the different meanings of happiness manifested in the texts. The Big Five model of personality was chosen considering its wide adoption in social science (Gomez et al., 2002).This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical background of this study. Section 3 presents the research hypotheses. Section 4 presents the research method and the key findings. Section 5 presents the conclusions and future research directions.1. Literature Review1.1. Definition of HappinessThe concept of happiness has become increasingly important in economy and consumer-related fields. This is because it is an important challenge to deliver more meaningful values to consumers by determining the degree of happiness consumers experience during consumption (Lipovetsky, 2009). Studies have also found that the sense of happiness consumers experience toward a brand has a positive influence on the perceived service quality, commitment level, and brand loyalty, clearly showing the close relationship between happiness and consumption (Hsee et al., 2009; Hellen et al., 2011).Various perspectives exist regarding the determinants of the consumers' happiness levels. First, there is a perspective that happiness means the same to all individuals, as it is a combination of objective external environmental factors (Layard, 2005). In other words, this perspective is based on objectivity, claiming that happiness is determined by external inputs consistently. A typical example is the approach to verify the degree of happiness by measuring physiological phenomena, such as electroencephalography (EEG) (Frey et al. …