092108 사람들은 자주 필요에 의해서가 아니라 남이 가지고 있어서 산다.
In this society largely dominated by capitalism, many economic or social factors hinder the general public from having sound consumption. As one of the undesirable phenomena, people tend to buy goods not because they need but because other people have, mainly owing to their longing to catch up with new trend and several related psychological effects.
As an idiom ‘keep up with the Joneses’ points out, people desire to keep up with the latest fad. Sometimes what others have looks much better than what we have and we might be jealous, just like the grass is always greener on the other side. Advertisements make use of these effects to promote their products. Particularly for women, products such as accessories and clothes that fabulous celebrities wear in advertisements wield an undeniable influence on women’s consumption. People also buy things that they do not need just because their role models in television such as famous athletes and professionals have the same thing. A sense of belonging and self-satisfaction are some of the major driving forces that lead people to unnecessary consumption.
What is more, many psychological culprits make people drawn by other people’s consumption before taking time to make rational decisions. One of them is Bandwagon effect; an economic concept that demonstrates indiscriminate purchase of products. People tend to be senselessly led to believe what the majority of people buy is reliable without knowledge of what it is they buy. It gives people a blind impression that they have to buy the same things because many others do. Thus, they end up buying things which are of no need for us. For instance, if a huge crowd surrounds certain product, people are driven into thinking that it would be great and just buy, but then they regret right after giving a close scrutiny of what they bought. That is a common reason of getting a refund.
To sum up, we get to buy things simply because others have, though we do not really need them in many circumstances. This irrationality is mainly due to innate crave for keeping up with the latest mode and bandwagon effect that drives people buy things because others buy, in the absence of knowledge of the products.