“True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them.”

So begins Edgar Allen Poe’s famous The Tell-Tale Heart. It tells the story of a murderer who becomes so overcome with their guilt that they hallucinate the sounds of their dead victim’s heart. Guilt becomes a powerful character in the story, ultimately leading the murderer to uncover the body and admit their wrongdoing.

It’s arguably the most famous story about the power of guilt, hinting its complexity, and mercurial potency as an emotion. When we feel we’ve done something wrong, our psyche acts in a strange way, unpredictable way to resolve this feeling.

Guilt isn’t an emotion reserved just for grim crimes. It’s an emotion we’re all familiar with, but just as in The Tell-Tale Heart, guilt in the consumer world is insidious, powerful, and unpredictable.

This leads consumers to act in strange, seemingly irrational ways. To better understand its impact on consumer behavior, we need to dive into the consumer psychology of guilt. 

The Consumer Psychology of Guilt

Many advertising campaigns use guilt as their primary emotion. Think of the anti-smoking ads. They target parents of young children with messages like, “when you smoke, they smoke.” And for every anti-texting and driving ad, there’s a graphic portrayal of a tragic accident caused by your inability to put down the phone.

This persuasion tactic makes complete sense. After all, we have a strong negativity bias—we’re more sensitive to things with potential harm than things which may bring us pleasure. Losing $20 hurts more than gaining $20 feels good. We’re more motivated to keep the $20 bill in our wallets than we are to gain a crisp new one.

Guilt, however, runs deeper than simple negativity. It emphasizes something that it assumes the person has already done. And because of this, it threatens our positive sense of self. We’re all motivated to see ourselves in a positive light, and so if we’re led to believe we’ve done something wrong, we compensate for this in other ways.

Imagine accidentally bumping into an old woman while you’re crossing the street. Even though you didn’t mean to, this may damage your positive sense of self. To prove to yourself that you’re a good person after all, you’d go out of your way to do something highly moral such as giving to a charity or walking the next old lady across the street. You might not realize why you’re doing it, but the guilt motivates you to compensate for your misdeed. In other words, a little guilt can go a long way.

The consumer world is no different. If we feel bad about a purchase, it forces us to wrestle with a feeling that we’re driven to alleviate. Just like The Tell Heart, guilt itself becomes a character in the story, and we can’t predict its effect on our consumer psychology.

Guilt, Consumer Behavior, and Compensation

Most people think the use of sweatshop labor is unethical, and want there to be some form of punishment for corporations who use it. But who wants to punish sweatshops using corporations more? The answer is surprising: People who recently purchased goods made from sweatshop labor actually wanted stronger punishments for corporations who do so. Surprisingly, these people are also much more vocal and angry about their anti-sweatshop stance as well.

This all comes down to guilt: When people feel complicit in moral wrongdoing, they try to alleviate this guilt and protect their images of themselves as good people. Again, a little guilt can go a long way.

Guilt about past purchases has a strange effect on future behavior. But the effect of guilt isn’t limited to products, but with money itself. Literal dollars and cents. Enter the strange world of affective tagging in science-speak.

Of course, a little reflection is needed before we see how irrational this is. Money is fundamentally fungible—a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. But in practice, dollars can be infused with meaning—what we call an “affective tag”. When we spend, for example, the feelings along with it lead us to spend the money in different ways. This is why we feel much looser at the poker table when we’re up big and “playing with house money”, and why we tend to spend our regular income on essential needs like groceries and gas but spend Amazon gift-cards on guilty pleasure items.

Studies show that when we feel guilty about receiving money, or feel we haven't deserved it, we’re much more likely to give it away. If we receive it from a source we don’t like—in their experiment, it was the tobacco company Philip Morris—the money feels bad. And in response, we cleanse ourselves of these negative feelings by spending it in a positive way like donating to charity. In contrast, if we receive money through a relative or from someone we like, we’re much more likely to spend it on hedonistic things like ice cream. Unencumbered by the conflict of tainted money, we feel free to spend this on ourselves and call it a ‘treat myself’ day.

Resolving The Consumer Psychology of Guilt

Obtaining guilty money creates an internal conflict: We want money, but we also want to feel as though we’re good people. Classic cognitive dissonance. If we accept money made from dirty, immoral ways, we naturally feel compelled to resolve this so we can tell ourselves we’re still good people, alleviating this dissonance and maintaining a positive self-image.

In this way, receiving guilty money leads us to act in a highly moral manner, in order to compensate. Depending on the source of the guilt, it leads us to act in specific, compensatory ways. Research has found that if the money comes from a moral violation, the person will spend it in prosocial ways, like giving to a charity. In contrast, if the money comes about from personal guilt (such as a failure of self-control), this increases spending on things self-improvement related, such as exercise equipment or a meditation app subscription to align the chakras.

Put simply - guilt plays a strange role in our consumer psychology. Whatever flaw is highlighted from the money, we compensate for this by how this guilty money is spent. Money is the sin, consumerism is the confessional. Guilt is a mercurial emotion. It yields a potent force over our lives, and over our purchasing decisions.

“I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

Edgar Allen Poe may have just described The Tell-Tale Consumer.

Photo by Aaron Sebastian via UnSplash

References for The Consumer Psychology of Guilt

Dahl, D. W., Honea, H., & Manchanda, R. V. (2005). Three Rs of interpersonal consumer guilt: Relationship, reciprocity, reparation. Journal of consumer Psychology, 15(4), 307-315.

Sen, S., Du, S., & Bhattacharya, C. B. (2016). Corporate social responsibility: A consumer psychology perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 70-75.

Kim, D. J., & Yoon, S. (2021). Guilt of the meat‐eating consumer: When animal anthropomorphism leads to healthy meat dish choices. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31(4), 665-683.