For you and for me: harvesting the benefits of prosocial spending in romantic relationships

ABSTRACT

This dyadic diary study explored how romantic partners benefit from prosocial spending within their relationships. For each of 21 days, couple members indicated whether they spent money on their partner and, if yes, reported the amount of money spent and the type(s) of purchase involved. Participants also completed daily measures of perceived partner responsiveness, and personal and relational well-being. Actor-partner interdependence model analyses showed that (a) the actor’s daily personal and relational well-being were associated with both the actor’s and the partner’s prosocial spending; (b) the actor’s perception of partner’s responsiveness mediated the effect of the partner’s prosocial spending on the actor’s well-being; and (c) experiential purchase (viz., food and other experiences) was associated with both parties’ relational well-being, but material purchase (viz., necessities) was not. Additional analyses suggested that (d) individual differences in prosocial concerns (viz., socioeconomic status and communal motivation) were associated with prosocial spending on one’s partner. (150 words)

KEYWORDS:

• Prosocial spending
• romantic relationships
• well-being
• communal motivation
• materialism
• socioeconomic status

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to John Martino for his editorial help on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. All analyses with the luxury purchase category did not converge. Compared to other types of prosocial purchases (food: 72.547%; other experiences: 12.912%; and necessity: 10.807%), our college sample reported few prosocial purchases on luxuries (3.727%). This could be a reason for the statistical non-convergence. Thus, we excluded luxury purchases in our data analysis.

2. For each analysis, six comparisons (2 effects × 3 outcomes) were made by constraining the actor (and the partner) effects of the predictor variable on the outcome variables to be equal across genders.

3. An alternative model with prosocial spending amount as the predictor yielded the same conclusion; see Supplementary Table 1.

4. An alternative model with prosocial spending amount as the predictor yielded the same conclusion; see Supplementary Figure 1.

5. Another supplementary mediation analysis with both prosocial spending behaviors and amount as predictors was conducted, the model fit was generally acceptable (χ² (40) = 93.231, p <.001, RMSEA = 0.034, CFI = 0.990, NNFI = 0.978, SRMR (for within) = 0.054, SRMR (for between) = 0.058). However, due to strong within-individual correlations between spending behaviors and amount (r_male =.647 and r_female =.542, ps <.01), neither predictor showed unique predictive power (ps >.126). Thus, the results were not reported.

6. An alternative model with prosocial spending amount as the predictor yielded the same conclusion; see Supplementary Table 2.

7. An alternative model with relationship quality, subjective well-being, and perceived responsiveness as three parallel outcome variables was examined; see Supplementary Table 3.

8. We attempted to test whether actor’s and partner’s individual differences in prosocial concerns affected how much responsiveness the actor perceived from the partner’s prosocial spending (i.e., the moderation effect on path c). However, results showed that within-individual paths c did not vary across individuals (∆SB – χ²s < 1.399, ps >.269), suggesting that these could not be moderated by individual-difference variables.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under Early Career Scheme (ECS; 24600415).