Boosting beauty in an economic decline: Mating, spending, and the lipstick effect
Hill and colleagues ask whether recessions change what women want to buy. They combine American unemployment and retail spending data covering nearly two decades with a series of experiments in which university students were shown recession cues, either a news article or a slideshow of unemployment and foreclosure images. Recession cues lowered desire for most products, such as electronics and household goods, but raised women's desire for products that enhance attractiveness to mates, and the authors describe this as the first experimental demonstration of the lipstick effect. The effect was driven by women's desire to attract mates with resources and depended on the perceived mate-attraction function of the products. The authors note that the real-world data are correlational, that the samples were students, and that men were not examined further.
Hill and colleagues ask whether recessions change what women want to buy. They combine American unemployment and retail spending data covering nearly two decades with a series of experiments in which university students were shown recession cues, either a news article or a slideshow of unemployment and foreclosure images. Recession cues lowered desire for most products, such as electronics and household goods, but raised women's desire for products that enhance attractiveness to mates, and the authors describe this as the first experimental demonstration of the lipstick effect. The effect was driven by women's desire to attract mates with resources and depended on the perceived mate-attraction function of the products. The authors note that the real-world data are correlational, that the samples were students, and that men were not examined further.
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Hill, S. E., Rodeheffer, C. D., Griskevicius, V., Durante, K., & White, A. E. (2012). Boosting beauty in an economic decline: Mating, spending, and the lipstick effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(2), 275-291. doi:10.1037/a0028657 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028657