When Vintage Products Help Face Existential Threats
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When Vintage Products Help Face Existential Threats

CONNECTING PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE, VINTAGE ITEMS SERVE A PSYCHOLOGICAL NEED, ACCORDING TO STUDIES BY GULEN SARIAL ABI AND COLLEAGUES. AND THAT'S THE REASON WHY THEY THRIVED DURING THE LARGEST ECONOMIC RECESSION IN DECADES

Vintage items, defined as previously owned goods from an earlier era, appeal to consumers for a variety of reasons. Gülen Sarial-Abi (Bocconi’s Department of Marketing) along with Aulona Ulqinaku (Bocconi’s Department of Management and Technology) and co-authors at Emory (Ryan Hamilton) and University of Minnesota (Kathleen Vohs) investigated the possibility that, in addition to possible economic and self-expressive reasons for preferring vintage, these items can also serve a psychological need: that of mentally connecting the past, present, and future (Stitching Time: Vintage Consumption Connects the Past, Present, and Future, forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Psychology, available online, doi: 10.1016/j.jcps.2016.06.004). They argued that as enduring emblems of another time, and as items that can still be used now and into the future, vintage pieces are imbued with a sense of intertemporal interconnection. These items retain value and meaning despite (and often because of) having come from an era that has passed, creating a symbolic connection across time. In this way, this research evaluates one of the psychological effects of vintage consumption.
 
“People sometimes experience psychological threats to their understanding of the world and their place in it”, says Prof. Sarial-Abi. “These threats include things like being reminded of one’s own death and feeling socially isolated, among other things. And because these experiences are uncomfortable, people seek out ways of defending themselves against them. We identified vintage consumption as one action consumers can take to bolster themselves against some types of psychological threats”.
 
Six studies and a pilot test run in a field setting tested the predictions. The pilot test measured the physical health of nursing home residents (aged 73 to 99, average age 88) as a proxy for likelihood of meaning threats. “We reasoned that people who were elderly and in poor health might be especially likely to experience these psychologically difficult meaning threats”. Participants evaluated both vintage and modern examples of nine types of products. Vintage items were more strongly preferred by elderly participants in poor health, relative to those in good health. The argument tested in this research is that when someone experiences a meaning threat, such as might be caused by experiencing chronic poor health during old age, vintage products are more appealing, because they facilitate interconnecting time, thereby bolstering against meaning threats.
 
For the remaining studies in the paper, participants were randomly assigned to conditions. For example, in another study, participants were randomly assigned to write a short essay about their own eventual deaths, an exercise previous research has shown to threaten meaning frameworks, or to write about dental pain, also unpleasant, but not existentially threatening. After the writing task, participants were asked to choose between pairs of vintage and modern products in eight different categories. As predicted, participants who had experienced a meaning threat, by thinking about death, were more likely to choose the vintage versions.
 
This research predicts that vintage items will tend to be more preferred when people experience meaning threats, such as those that might happen more frequently during large-scale disruptions during the course of daily events. “It is perhaps more than coincidental that recent upticks in embracing vintage co-occurred with the largest global economic recession in many generations”, Sarial Abi continues. “Major economic uncertainty creates existential unease and presents a global threat to meaning. In our view that might well have led consumers to seek vintage items — tangible, consoling products — in order to assuage the meaning threat caused by economic malaise”.

by Ezio Renda
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