Abstract
Objectives
Impulse buying occurs frequently and leads to many negative consequences, but few intervention studies have addressed this issue. The current study aimed to apply an online self-compassion intervention called the “Positive Self” to intervene in impulse buying, and explored the role played by materialism and self-control in the relationship between self-compassion and impulse buying.
Method
A total of 191 participants were randomly allocated to an intervention group or waitlist control group. The intervention was a 14-day online self-help intervention. Self-compassion, materialism, self-control, and impulse buying were assessed at pretest, posttest, and 1-month follow-up.
Results
Compared to the waitlist control group, the intervention group showed a significant increase in self-compassion and self-control, as well as a significant decrease in materialism and impulse buying. Changes in self-compassion and self-control were maintained at the 1-month follow-up. The reduction of materialism and enhancement of self-control played a chain mediating role in the intervention’s effects on impulse buying.
Conclusions
This study demonstrated the benefits of self-compassion in reducing impulse buying and proved the effectiveness of an online self-help self-compassion course for this purpose.
Preregistration
This study is not pre-registered.
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Data Availability
The data reported in this manuscript can be retrieved from: https://osf.io/sr3ej/?view_only=b9fcdf43c5af42d6b5c54128a3e7fb65.
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32200896).
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Contributions
YW: conceptualization, methodology, data collection, data analyses, writing—original draft, writing—reviewing and editing. JZ: data analyses, writing—original draft; XG: data analyses, data sharing, writing—original draft. XZ: project supervision, methodology, writing—reviewing and editing, intervention development; MW: intervention development. YW conceptualized the project under the guidance of XZ, conducted the research, analyzed the data and wrote the original manuscript. JZ, XG, and XZ revised the article. XZ and MW provided the online self-help course. All the authors discussed the results.
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This study was approved by the IRB of Beijing Normal University. All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study prior to data collection.
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Wang, Y., Zhou, J., Gu, X. et al. The Effect of Self-Compassion on Impulse Buying: A Randomized Controlled Trial of an Online Self-Help Intervention. Mindfulness 14, 1542–1551 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-023-02139-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-023-02139-y