Anxious and Status Signaling: Examining the Link between Attachment Style and Status Consumption and the Mediating Role of Materialistic Values

Attachment theory has recently been recognized as a potentially fruitful avenue for studying consumer behavior. However, few studies have examined the relationship between attachment styles and consumer preferences. Based on literature suggesting that individuals with anxious attachment styles have a particularly strong need for attention, we hypothesized and found that consumers with this attachment pattern displayed a higher propensity to purchase status-signaling goods than their peers with secure attachment styles. This effect was mediated by materialistic values, such that participants with an anxious attachment style reported the highest materialistic values. Additionally, and unlike previous scholarly work, we found evidence that an avoidant attachment style might be related to materialism. Together, the current findings highlight the importance of attachment theory in the study of status-signaling consumption and offer potential implications for research on social status and related research areas.

Status Signaling and the Risk of Domestic Opposition: Comparing South Africa and Brazil's Hosting of the 2010 and 2014 World Cups

Whereas much of the literature on status and domestic audiences analyzes how international achievement helps shore up domestic legitimacy, analyses regarding the opposite direction—how the lack of domestic support undercuts status signaling—remain rare. Mega-events constitute a highly public and visible example of conspicuous consumption as a form of status signaling. However, in rising democracies state elites are obliged to frame the benefits of hosting a World Cup in both instrumental dimensions and expressive virtues. In Brazil, the political fallout from the economic crisis, however, made it very difficult for state elites to rely on the expressive value of Brazil's status as World Cup host to subdue domestic opposition driven by instrumental logics. In contrast, for South Africans, the 2010 World Cup not only became an “exceptional status moment” but also constituted a “nation founding moment,” which meant that the expressive significance of hosting the first World Cup in Africa mitigated similar instrumental criticism.

International Status and Japan

Beyond material power, states and people have shown themselves to be also interested in status, claiming and demonstrating their ostensibly rightful place atop (or near the top of) some kind of acknowledged hierarchy. Because status signaling is so pervasive, even ubiquitous, in global politics, it would be difficult to say that status matters especially to Japan. But it does seem to matter particularly to Japan, in the sense that there are particular motifs and themes that have been astonishingly consistent, not to mention widely exploitable and open-ended, in Japanese social debates about the country’s place as a potential global leader. This chapter traces debates about status, and argues that narrative is essential to understanding how status claims work and why they matter. It then sets three highly charged episodes—all of them involving arguments about Japan’s international position—against the backdrop of a widely shared postwar narrative about Japan.

Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched consumption responses

The national lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that few days of limited travel and consumption are enough to improve air quality worldwide, thus contributing to sustainable development. But under regular circumstances, shoppers are reluctant to change their consumption habits for the common good. Why is that? To answer this question, we delineate proximate and ultimate explanations of consumer behavior. The former—pervasive in the marketing literature—focuses on how behaviors occur, whereas the latter—underrepresented in marketing thought and practice—focuses on why human evolution fashioned such behaviors. The evolutionary approach to consumer behavior considers both explanations. We draw on the fundamental motives framework, which explains why certain behaviors—often irrational at first glance—solve specific adaptive problems found in ancestral and modern societies. Finally, we show how evolutionary mismatches—where mechanisms solving adaptive problems in ancient times produce maladaptive outcomes nowadays—distort optimal and sustainable decision-making in three domains: voting, buying status-signaling goods, and food consumption. We conclude by showing how to apply the law of law's leverage to facilitate cost-effective policymaking.