Abstract
Impulsive buying makes billions of dollars for retail businesses every year, particularly in an era of thriving e-commerce. Narcissism, characterized by impulsivity and materialism, may serve as a potential antecedent to impulsive buying. To test this hypothesis, two studies examined the relationship between narcissism and impulsive buying. In Study 1, we surveyed an online sample and found that while adaptive narcissism was not correlated with impulsive buying, maladaptive narcissism was significantly predictive of the impulsive buying tendency. By investigating 304 twin pairs, Study 2 showed that global narcissism and its two components, adaptive and maladaptive narcissism, as well as the impulsive buying tendency were heritable. The study found, moreover, that the connections between global narcissism and impulsive buying, and between maladaptive narcissism and impulsive buying were genetically based. These findings not only establish a link between narcissism and impulsive buying but also help to identify the origins of the link. The present studies deepen our understanding of narcissism, impulsive buying, and their interrelationship.
Highlights
On November 11, 2014, the so-called “double 11” date, consumers from 217 countries spent 57.1 billion Chinese Yuan on Alibaba, the largest Chinese online shopping site1, standing in sharp contrast to the site’s daily average purchase total
To test the hypothesis that narcissism may predict the tendency for impulsive buying, we examined the relationship of impulsive buying with overall narcissism first and thereafter with its two components: adaptive narcissism and maladaptive narcissism
We failed to find a significant relation between overall narcissism and impulsive buying, we did found that maladaptive narcissism was significantly predictive
Summary
On November 11, 2014, the so-called “double 11” date, consumers from 217 countries spent 57.1 billion Chinese Yuan (about US $9.3 billion) on Alibaba, the largest Chinese online shopping site, standing in sharp contrast to the site’s daily average purchase total. It is well documented that impulsive buying constitutes a large portion of daily purchases, in this time of e-commerce (Kacen and Lee, 2002; Zhang and Shrum, 2009). In the U.S, for example, impulsive buying contributes US $4.2 billion to annual sales (Mogelonsky, 1998) and accounts for 50% of all mall purchases (Nichols et al, 2001). In the past half century, extensive research has been done on impulsive buying and established that impulsive buying could be either a spontaneous behavior. Narcissism predicts impulsive buying triggered by situational factors, or a relatively stable tendency that varies across individuals (Rook, 1987; Rook and Fisher, 1995). We treated impulsive buying as a trait-like individual difference variable, and for the first time, investigated the relationship between narcissism and impulsive buying. We examined the phenotypic relationship between them, and the genetic basis underlying this relationship
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