Spending that fits personality can boost well-being

Of course, there can be long-term consequences. Spending too much now might mean you don't have enough later. Spending a lot on food or alcohol that you enjoy now might make you sick later.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/afps-stf040716.php

Public Release: 7-Apr-2016
Spending that fits personality can boost well-being
Association for Psychological Science

Money could buy happiness if your purchases fit your personality, according to a new study that examines nearly 77,000 actual UK bank spending transactions.

The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, revealed that people who spent more money on purchases that aligned with their personality traits reported greater life satisfaction. Spending-personality fit was more strongly associated with life satisfaction than were either total income or total spending.

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And the data showed that those who bought products that more closely matched their personalities reported higher satisfaction with their lives, and this effect was stronger than that of their total income or total spending.

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"Historically, studies had found a weak relationship between money and overall well-being," says Joe Gladstone. "Our study breaks new ground by mining actual bank-transaction data and demonstrating that spending can increase our happiness when it is spent on goods and services that fit our personalities and so meet our psychological needs."

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The researchers also backed up their findings by running a second experiment, where they gave people a voucher to spend in either a bookshop or at a bar. Extroverts who were forced to spend at a bar were happier than introverts forced to spend at a bar, while introverts forced to spend at a bookshop were happier than extroverts forced to spend at a bookshop. This follow-up experiment overcomes the limitations of correlational data by demonstrating that spending money on things that match a person's personality can cause an increase in happiness.

"Our findings suggest that spending money on products that help us express who we are as individuals could turn out to be as important to our well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood or even the right friends and partners," says Sandra Matz.

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