Consumer style and health: The role of impulsive buying in unhealthy eating

Abstract

Health psychologists have given surprisingly little attention to consumer behavior. This study focuses on the relationship between an impulsive consumer style and unhealthy eating. In a survey, moderate to strong correlations were found between low self-esteem, dispositional negative affect, impulse buying tendency, snacking habit, and eating disturbance propensity. Structural equation modeling was used to test a model of relations between these variables. Impulse buying tendency was strongly associated with snacking habit, which in turn was related to eating disturbance propensity. Impulse buying, though in itself a pleasurable activity, seemed driven by feelings of low self-esteem and dispositional negative affect. Low self-esteem had a direct link to eating disturbance propensity. The data fit a self-regulation explanation. The study demonstrates the relevance of consumer style for health-related behaviors.

Keywords:

• Impulse buying
• snack foods
• eating disturbances
• self-esteem
• trait mood
• emotional distress
• consumer style

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank Toril Sørheim Nilsen for collecting the data, and Pirjo Honkanen and Joar Vittersø for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

As one referee rightly commented, the scores on this measure may be influenced by events such as going on a holiday or events occurring in one's family. However, the data were collected in the middle of a semester, and it can be expected that idiosyncratic events will cancel out across the sample and thus appear as measurement error.

As this is often the case with structural equation modeling, alternative models in which the directions of (some) paths are reversed can be found fitting the data as well. However, the present model is empirically the best fitting and seems to us theoretically the most compelling one.