Reducing consumer materialism and compulsive buying through emotional intelligence training amongst Lithuanian students

Abstract

Consumers’ inclinations towards materialism and compulsive buying are influenced by a variety of factors. Materialistic consumers face maladies that cause stress and lower subjective well-being and are unable to control their buying behaviour that in turn leads to social and financial issues. This paper aims to investigate the effect of emotional intelligence training on consumers’ materialism and compulsive buying. The experimental design involves 36 respondents across both groups. Findings confirm the hypothesis that ability-based training programmes can help consumers improve their emotional intelligence whilst also lowering their levels of materialism and compulsive buying. In sum, the results extend the existing literature on consumer materialism by providing an explanation on how specific emotional ability-based training can diminish materialistic and excessive buying inclinations. The development of emotional intelligence skills-based training programmes contributes to more sustainable consumer behaviour, mitigating the vulnerability to materialism and related addictive behavioural consequences.

Big Five Personality Traits and Compulsive Buying: The Mediating Role of Self-Esteem

“…can also be an important step towards their management [8]. Specifically, recent evidence that a program focused on raising an individual's level of emotional competence contributed to decreasing consumers' inclinations towards CB [97] endorses our recommendation. Lastly, focusing attention on some facets of neuroticism such as anxiety, depression and vulnerability to stress that the previous literature has found to be strongly associated with CB [69] would contribute to reducing and/or mitigating their impact on this behavioral problem.…”

Update on treatment studies for compulsive buying-shopping disorder: A systematic review

“…Considering the findings indicating that younger consumers tend to engage in problematic online shopping more often than older individuals ( Augsbuger et al., 2020 ; Duroy et al., 2014 ; Müller, Steins-Loeber, et al., 2019 ), more research on prevention or interventions targeting youth populations vulnerable to CBSD (e.g., because of high materialistic values endorsement), with a special emphasis on online CBSD, is necessary. Interventions to reduce a materialistic goal orientation related to compulsive buying in young adults have already been examined ( Lekavičienė et al., 2022 ; Parker, Kasser, Bardi, Gatersleben, & Druckman, 2020 ) and should be further elaborated.…”