• April 24, 2024

New therapy against loneliness? People who love shopping are often represented as lonely souls, trying to fill their vacuum by buying, and in the process become even more lonely.

However, according to a new iDutch research , Is not always that way. The relationship between shopping and loneliness can go in both directions, and this has a lot to do with why you buy, according to the researcher Rik Pieters, professor of marketing at the University of Tilburg, in the Netherlands .

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Buyers who could be described as "happy hedonists" may feel less alone, he said.

Have fun and forget about materialism

"Buying to feel happy or to have more things than others is not a good idea, but buying because it's fun might not really be a bad idea after all," he said.

Loneliness can encourage materialism, he found, but the right kind of it can reduce this feeling, it is detailed in the study published in the Journal of Consumer Research .

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People who bought things to improve their social status ("You have more jeans than me, but my house is bigger") tended to become more lonely.

However, those who went shopping simply because they enjoyed it, as part of a "lifestyle of happy hedonism", did better. "It turns out that this last kind of materialism actually reduces loneliness, probably because enjoyment spreads to other people," Pieters said. "It has nothing to do with bragging, comparing or envying."