The Effects of Impulsivity on Perceptions of Prior Consumption

Extant research suggests that individuals will give in to indulgence when they perceive sufficient progress toward a regulatory goal (Fishbach and Dhar 2005; Mukhopadhyay, Sengupta, and Ramanathan 2008). For example, if a dieter feels as though she has abstained from eating unhealthy food for a long enough time, she may feel that it is permissible to eat an unhealthy food item. That is, given that sufficient progress toward the dieting goal has been made, the dieter may then switch to pursuing an indulgence goal, licensing herself to eat something tasty but unhealthy (Fishbach and Dhar 2005; Laran 2010) This body of research assumes that consumers accurately remember past progress toward a goal. However, a large body of research on motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990) demonstrates that people are prone to distort their memories in a motivated manner in order to make themselves feel better about decisions made (Croyle et al. 2006; Mather et al. 2000). In line with such findings, we contend that, when faced with an opportunity to indulge, consumers may be motivated to distort their memories to fabricate progress toward a pertinent self-regulatory goal, allowing themselves to indulge in the present. Further, because such a situation is more likely to arise in the case of competing goals, we predict that those who are high in impulsivity, who chronically have indulgence goals (Ramanathan and Menon 2006) and thus, often experience conflicts between short-term pleasure versus long-term self-regulatory goals (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2008), are more likely to employ such memory distortions than those who are low in impulsivity