“My life is a mess, I deserve a brownie:” Justifying indulgence by overstating the severity of life problems

Abstract

Consumers frequently experience goal conflict, where they have to choose between staying on course to achieve a goal and succumbing to a tempting indulgence that interrupts goal pursuit. This study introduces a novel strategy consumers use to justify the choice of an indulgent (goal‐conflicting) option over a righteous (goal‐aligned) one. In three experimental studies involving real consumption decisions, the authors show that before choosing a goal‐conflicting option over a goal‐aligned one, consumers overstate the severity of their life problems before making their choice to feel more deserving of the indulgence. This justification strategy is apparent when the goal‐conflicting option is chosen over a goal‐aligned option (vs. over another goal‐conflicting option—i.e., no goal conflict), and when the severity of life problems is reported before (vs. after) making the final choice. Furthermore, the findings reveal a positive downstream consequence of the proposed justification strategy on choice satisfaction. These findings contribute to the growing research on consumers' tendency to create reasons to justify indulgences, in this case at the expense of deliberately degrading one's current state to feel more deserving of indulgence.

I will say “No” to that cookie: How imagined future self‐regulation drives current self‐regulation

“…May and Irmak (2014) demonstrated that, when faced with an indulgence opportunity, consumers tend to increase the amount of time that has passed since their past indulgence to justify their immediate indulgence. In a similar vein, Tezer and Sobol (2021) demonstrated that, when presented with a goal‐incongruent option along with a goal‐congruent option, consumers tend to overstate the negativity of their life events to feel a sense of deservingness for their subsequent indulgence. The present research expands this stream of research by suggesting that consumers tend to strategically manipulate the information or fact not only to justify a bad behavior (i.e., indulgence) but also to prompt a good behavior (i.e., self‐regulation) in their subsequent consumption episode.…”

“…We provide an explanation for why a future temptation-related act induces a consistency effect by showing that consumers who imagine themselves resisting to future temptation as compared with those who imagine themselves succumbing to future temptation change their cognitive construal of tempting food to promote the attainment of their goal and thus heighten current resistance. Accordingly, our research extends the counteractive construal framework to the intertemporal context, thereby offering a better understanding of consumers' tendencies to distort the information in a way that facilitates their subsequent consumption decision (e.g., May & Irmak, 2014;Tezer & Sobol, 2021).…”

Effects of plan specificity and eveningness–morningness orientation on health goal pursuit

“…Therefore, growing research has focused on understanding how consumers cope with self‐regulation challenges. On the one hand, consumers strategically exaggerate the severity of their life problems to create reasons to justify their unhealthy food choices (Tezer & Sobol, 2021). On the other hand, consumers form behavioral commitments to health goals by developing implementation plans to prevent self‐regulation failures (David & Haws, 2016).…”

A good reason to buy: Justification drives the effect of advertising frames on impulsive socially responsible buying

“…Moreover, they argue that they deserve to self‐gift when they have accomplished something (Londoño & Ruiz de Maya, 2022; Mick & DeMoss, 1990), or feel that they are entitled to spoil themselves with hedonic products when they are in a bad mood (Taylor et al, 2014). Tezer and Sobol (2021) even show that consumers exaggerate the severity of their daily problems to justify why they deserve to indulge. Presumably, deservingness justifications for impulse buying are more often elicited by self‐benefit messages than by other‐benefit messages, as, by definition, self‐benefit messages are more focused on “the self.”…”