Appearance vanity or achievement vanity: which better predicts young consumers’ decision-making orientations?

What is it about?

Our study looks at the way people make shopping decisions and considers them as part of a bigger picture. We explore how two types of vanity, which we call 'appearance vanity' and 'achievement vanity', influence these decisions. We gathered information from an online survey with 319 young adults and built a complex model to understand this relationship. What we found is quite interesting: people who care a lot about how they look (appearance vanity) tend to make shopping decisions that are either very socially driven or not very practical. On the other hand, people who take pride in their achievements (achievement vanity) make more practical, utilitarian choices. Up until now, researchers hadn't really looked at shopping decisions this way, as a layered concept. Our work fills in this gap by showing that these decision-making styles can indeed be connected to personal traits like vanity, giving us a new way to understand why people buy what they buy.

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