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Consumer goods and services have psychological value that can equal or exceed their functional value. A burgeoning literature demonstrates that one source of value emerges from the capacity for products to serve as a psychological salve that reduces various forms of distress across numerous domains. This review systematically organizes and integrates the literature on the use of consumer behavior as a means to regulate self-discrepancies, or the incongruities between how one currently perceives oneself and how one desires to view oneself (Higgins, 1987). We introduce a Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model to explain the psychological consequences of self-discrepancies on consumer behavior. This model delineates five distinct strategies by which consumers cope with self-discrepancies: direct resolution, symbolic self-completion, dissociation, escapism, and fluid compensation. Finally, the authors raise critical questions to guide future research endeavors. Overall, the present review provides both a primer on compensatory consumer behavior and sets an agenda for future research.

This research illustrates how risk domain moderates the effects of priming the interdependent self versus the independent self on consumers’ risk‐taking. Experiment 1 showed that individuals whose interdependent selves were activated were more risk‐seeking in their financial choices and less risk‐seeking in their social choices than were those whose independent selves were activated. The size of the consumer’s social network mediated these effects. Experiment 2 replicated these results using audiovisual movie clips as manipulations.

This research examines the moderating role of attempted dietary restraint on the amount of food consumed from small food in small packages versus large food in large packages. Four experiments demonstrate that restrained eaters consume more calories from small food in small packages, while unrestrained eaters consume more calories from large food in a large package. For restrained eaters, overconsumption of the small food in small packages results from a lapse in self‐control caused by the stress of perceiving conflicting food information: the small food in small packages is perceived as both diet food and high in calories.

In this research, we document and explain a counterintuitive effect of political ideology on variety-seeking. Although political conservatives have a higher desire for control, which exerts a negative effect on variety-seeking, they also have a stronger motivation to follow social norms, which exerts a positive effect on variety-seeking. Three studies demonstrate that conservatism is positively related to variety-seeking due to social normative concerns and rule out an alternative explanation of heightened self-expressive motives among conservatives. This research provides preliminary evidence of how political ideology may explain differences in product choices.

This research examines the impact of media depictions of success (or failure) on consumers’ desire for luxury brands. In a pilot study and three additional studies, we demonstrate that reading a story about a similar/successful other, such as a business major from the same university, increases consumers’ expectations about their own future wealth, which in turn increases their desire for luxury brands. However, reading about a dissimilar successful other, such as a biology major, lowers consumers’ preferences for luxury brands. Furthermore, we examine the role of ease of imagining oneself in the narrative as a mediator of the relation between direction of comparison, similarity, and brand preference.

This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the effects of religion on consumer behavior, with the goal of stimulating future research at the intersection of these two topics. We delineate religion as a multidimensional construct and propose that religion affects consumer psychology and behavior through four dimensions—beliefs, rituals, values, and community. For each dimension of religion, we offer definitions and measures, integrate previous findings from research in the psychology, consumer behavior, marketing, and religion literatures, and propose testable future research directions. With this conceptual framework and research agenda, we challenge consumer researchers to ask deeper questions about why religious affiliation and level of religiosity may be driving previously established differences in consumer behavior, and to uncover the psychological mechanisms underlying the effects. This framework complements and extends previous literature and provides a new delineated framework for considering research on the effects of religion on consumer behavior.

We examine several factors that determine whether exposure to thin (or heavy) media images positively or negatively affects consumers’ appearance self‐esteem. We find that the effects of exposure to models in advertisements depend on two moderating factors: (1) the extremity of the model’s thinness or heaviness, and (2) the method by which self‐esteem is measured (free responses vs. rating scales). We also establish the underlying role of self‐knowledge activation by examining response latencies in a lexical decision task.