13 Chapter 1 Mediated mindfulness cues A third societal development which is relevant to impulse buying behavior, is the attention for meaning-orientated consumption, such as mindful consumption (e.g., Sheth et al., 2011; Jain et al., 2023). When consuming mindfully, people not only take care of themselves, but also support the environment. This often results in tempering excessive consumption (Sheth et al., 2011). Even though impulse purchases can help retailers to thrive (Mehra et al., 2017) and provide consumers with short-term positive emotions (e.g., Verplanken & Sato, 2011), the negative consequences of such purchases should not be overlooked. Impulse buying often conflicts with consumers’ personal goals. As a result, the brief euphoria of buying on impulse can quickly be replaced by feelings of regret (e.g., Skelton & Allwood, 2017), guilt, or shame (e.g., Yi & Baumgartner, 2011). Many impulsively bought items are, perhaps therefore, thrown out within a short period of time after purchase or are stored somewhere in the back of a closet, attic, or garage (Boersma, 2020). This behavior not only harms consumers but also has serious negative environmental implications due to the waste of resources and transportation (Boersma, 2020). As a response to this dark side of consumption, both society and science are increasingly paying attention to mindful consumption (e.g., Sheth et al., 2011; Jain et al., 2023). In addition, the number of people who practice mindfulness in Western societies has grown substantially (Arthington, 2016). A growing body of research suggests that mindfulness seems promising in reducing impulse buying (e.g., Rosenberg, 2004; Bahl et al., 2016) by showing a negative correlation between trait mindfulness and impulse buying trait (e.g., Dhandra, 2020). However, the effect of mindfulness on impulse buying is not clear. Some studies discuss that mindfulness could perhaps even lower the threshold for giving in to one’s desire (to buy) (Friese & Hoffman, 2016). Therefore, we will study the influence of mediated mindfulness cues, such as online guided mindfulness meditations, on impulse buying urges and behavior. Although mindfulness is often referred to as a seemingly promising phenomenon when it comes to decreasing impulse buying, we will also address the possible risk of self-presentation bias in these studies on mindfulness and impulse buying. Self-presentation bias is the difference between what people say they do when asked about their behavior (in self-reported data) and how they actually act. We will approach self-presentation bias as a possible distorting self-inference process that can cause misleading outcomes in research on mindfulness and impulse buying. Therefore, the third and final goal of this dissertation can be formulated as follows: Goal 3: To examine the effect of mediated mindfulness instructions on consumers’ impulse buying urges and behavior and critically discuss the role of self-presentation bias in research on mindfulness and impulse buying. In sum, societal developments have introduced new commonly used media cues, which may affect impulse buying urges and behavior. We will study the effects on impulse buying of three media cues that are most relevant to the current times, namely phygital cues, CSR advertising cues, and mediated mindfulness cues. In the final section of this introduction, we will address the societal and scientific relevance of this dissertation, along with the outline of the empirical chapters.
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