Looking beyond impulse buying: A cross-cultural and multi-domain investigation of consumer impulsiveness

This paper aims to conceptualize consumer impulsiveness (CI) as a global trait to explore its influence on a wider range of consumer behaviours and also presents a revised CI scale. Prior research on CI focuses on the impulse buying context and does not establish the cross-cultural invariance of the CI scale.

Two studies with undergraduate and MBA students in Singapore, UK and USA were used to develop the revised CI scale and to test its cross-cultural measurement invariance and predictive validity.

CI is a three-dimensional construct with cognitive (imprudence), affective (self-indulgence) and behavioural (lack of self-control) dimensions. However, self-indulgence and lack of self-control positively (do not) correlate for consumers with independent (interdependent) self-concepts. These three dimensions also vary in their influence on different types of self-regulatory failures.

The student participants used in all the studies may be relatively younger and better educated compared to average consumers. Hence, there is a need to test the revised CI scale with diverse consumer populations.

The revised CI scale would help future researchers study the influence of CI across diverse cultures and self-regulatory failures in a reliable and rigorous manner.

Our findings may help control the onset and spread of self-regulatory failures among young consumers by early identification of their psychological origins.

This paper extends the scope of CI beyond impulse buying to study its impact on self-regulatory failure across five diverse behavioural domains (driving, eating, entertainment, shopping and substance abuse).