Costly Curves: How Human-Like Spending Can Increase Spending

Indianapolis, IN

In 2016, Marisabel Romero and Adam W. Craig published a marketing research study called, Costly Curves: How Human-Like Shapes Can Increase Spending. The study said that western society associates thinness with economic value and it argued that thin, human-like shapes influences consumer self-efficacy judgements and spending outcomes, depending on the perceiver’s weight. The research provided by Romero and Craig concluded to several contributions to theory and consumer policy. First and foremost, the research provided a deeper understanding of how seeing a shape resembling a weight group both activates stereotype knowledge and initiates social comparison processes. As well as, the research examined how exposure to an overweight person can affect food consumption, which provided evidence that the positive association between thinness and economic benefits can affect consumer financial decisions. Furthermore, the research also demonstrated that when individuals are exposed to thin (vs. wide) images, both their financial self-efficacy judgments and financial decisions are affected. The main issue in this research involves the impact human-like shapes can have on Anderson University undergraduates’ spending choices. The theory is that exposure to thin, human-like shapes influences self-efficacy judgments and spending outcomes, depending on the participant's weight. I wanted to test to see if seeing a thin (vs. wide), human-like shape leads consumers with a high body mass index to make more indulgent decisions than low-body mass index individuals. Students were sent the survey through their campus email and be asked to complete it--which should be able to be completed within 5 minutes.