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RESEARCHERS

The Science of Retail Therapy: Why Shopping Feels Like a Fix — and Why It Usually Isn't

3 the researchers behind it — "A little retail therapy" is one of those phrases that sounds like self-care and lands as self-sabotage. Consumer psychology has spent three decades m

Knox College

Tim Kasser

Known for:Empirical research on materialistic values and well-being, showing that placing financial success above intrinsic goals predicts lower life satisfaction, higher anxiety, and compensatory acquisitiveness

Key findings

  1. 1993

    With Richard Ryan, Kasser found that aspiring for financial success above intrinsic goals was associated with lower vitality, more negative affect, and higher anxiety — the first empirical demonstration of materialism as an independent psychological risk factor. ↗

  2. 2002

    Kasser synthesized a decade of findings showing materialistic individuals consistently report lower personal well-being across dozens of studies, and proposed that chronic insecurity — not personality — drives compensatory acquisitiveness as a strategy to meet unmet psychological needs. ↗

Tilburg University

Rik Pieters

Known for:Goal-setting model of compulsive buying — longitudinal research showing that chronic loneliness drives materialistic striving and compulsive buying as a failed proxy for social connection

Key findings

  1. 2013

    Pieters' longitudinal study found that chronic loneliness predicted increased materialism, which in turn predicted compulsive buying — but compulsive buying failed to alleviate the loneliness that triggered it, sustaining the cycle. The study reframed compulsive buying as primarily driven by social deficit, not greed. ↗

University of Michigan Ross School of Business

Scott Rick

Known for:Consumer psychology of emotional spending — experimental research establishing retail therapy as a documented emotion-regulation behavior, and work on how attitudes toward money shape spending patterns

Key findings

  1. 2008

    With Cryder and Loewenstein, Rick found that sad shoppers made significantly more unplanned purchases than neutral-mood shoppers, and that these purchases produced real short-term mood repair — establishing retail therapy as a genuine, if risky, emotion-regulation strategy with operant reinforcement history. ↗

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