Restrained by Resources: The Joint Effect of Scarcity Cues and Childhood Socioeconomic Status (SES) on Consumer Preference for Feasibility

Consumers’ current socioeconomic status (SES) has been widely acknowledged as an important factor that affects various aspects of their behavior, such as aggression (Greitemeyer and Sagioglou 2016), prosocial behavior (Piff et al., 2010) and variety-seeking (Yoon and Kim 2017). However, scant marketing literature examines whether and how consumers’ childhood SES affects their behavior. Compared to consumers’ current SES, childhood SES represents consumers’ early life environments and functions more like a latent factor. Thus, once activated by situational factors, the behavior patterns that people have formed in childhood are likely to affect their decision-making regardless of their current SES. Therefore, it is important to put childhood SES in the spotlight and to examine its interactive effect with important situational factors in shaping consumer behavior. To address this void, we study the interplay of childhood SES and resource scarcity cues. Specifically, drawing from research on scarcity cues (Mehta and Zhu 2016; Roux, Goldsmith, and Bonezzi 2015), life history theory (Griskevicius et al. 2013; Laran and Salerno 2013; Mittal and Griskevicius 2014), and construal level theory (Liberman and Trope 1998), we propose and demonstrate that the combination of low childhood SES and resource scarcity cues leads to a low construal level and thus propels consumer preference for feasibility in product choices.