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What meaning do you attach to products and brands? If you are like many consumers, products and brands have psychological utility in addition, and perhaps in some cases exceeding, their functional value. A Louis Vuitton handbag is not just a container for holding personal objects; a Ferrari is not simply a vehicle to get a consumer from point A to point B; and a sweatshirt of one's undergraduate alma mater is not merely a piece of clothing to stay warm. Rather, each of these objects has the potential to signal one's identity to both the self and others. Of particular interest to me is how psychological threatwhen one feels unsuccessful in an important domain of the self-concept shapes the type of products one desires. Specifically, the notion that people might cope with threat through consumption is termed, compensatory consumption.

In my first foray into compensatory consumption, I demonstrated that psychological threats in the form of feeling powerless could affect consumption. Feeling powerless represents a psychological threat in that people often desire power (i.e., control over precious resources in relation to others). My colleague Adam Galinsky and I proposed that, as power is intimately associated with status, when consumers feel powerless they might exhibit a shift in preferences towards objects associated with status. To test this idea, we instructed undergraduate students to write about a time they felt powerless or powerful. Subsequently, participants indicated their reservation price for a framed portrait of their university that was either described as scarce (high-status) or as common (low-status). Participants who had written about a past experience of feeling powerless were willing to pay more for the framed portrait of their university, but only when that framed portrait was represented as scarce (i.e., high status). Essentially, consumers, seemingly unbeknownst to themselves, sought consumption to offset the psychological state of feeling powerless.

However, the fact consumers engage in compensatory consumption does not mean consumption is always an antidote for a psychological threat. In work with Monika Lisjak, Andrea Bonezzi, and Soo Kim, we demonstrated that compensatory consumption can worsen psychological threat. For example, in one experiment we first threatened participants' perceptions of their intelligence and then we gave them the opportunity to either select a product that signaled intelligence or a product that signaled sociability. Finally, we measured participants' tendency to ruminate on (i.e., repeatedly think about) the threatening experience. We found that participants who chose a product that signaled success in the domain of threat, which in theory can offset the threat, heightened rumination about the threat. Furthermore, additional experiments suggest that, as a consequence of rumination, participants perform poorer on tasks that involved subsequent attention, such as completing math problems.

My current work continues to try to understand how consumers protect their sense of self in the face of psychological threat. I hope to answer the question of when consumption is a sound salve for threat versus a hollow substitute as a means to understand the powerful and transformative effects of brands and products.

Dr. Rucker and his colleague, Adam Galinsky, proposed that, as power is intimately associated with status, when consumers feel powerless they might exhibit a shift in preferences towards objects associated with status. How are Rucker and Galinksky's research findings related to the theory of embodied cognition? Briefly define and explain this concept.