One of my closest friends is a compulsive buyer. She always makes me laugh because she never says, “I want this.” She always says, “I need this.”
I sometimes go to her house and notice a new kettle, some pretty tins or a new flower pot. She sees my gaze and clearly thinks, “Damn! I forgot to hide that thing.” Before I’ve even said a word, she’s already justifying it.
“It was only £2…”
“I needed one because…”
I just smile. “No, Isabelle. You didn’t need it. You wanted it.”
We All Do It
Isabelle isn’t unusual. We all do it. We buy something because we want it, then we come up with perfectly good reasons to justify why we needed it. Psychologists have been studying buying behaviour for decades, and one idea comes up again and again: we like to think we buy logically, but emotion plays a much bigger part than we’d like to admit.
So why do we buy things?
People buy for two reasons:
- The rational reason: because they have a need for something you offer. In short, to satisfy a need.
- The emotional reason: people buy what they want – and what they desire.
In other words, we buy a washing machine because we need one, either for the first time or as a replacement. It’s a must-have.
But which washing machine do we buy?
If we genuinely need a washing machine because the old one has broken, why do we leave the shop convinced we chose it because of the features, the price or the energy rating?
Maybe. But what if that’s not the whole story?
What Happens in Our Brain?
For years, neuroscientists have been trying to understand how we make decisions. What they’ve discovered is that reason and emotion work together. We don’t stop being rational when we buy something, but our emotions help guide our choices, often without us even realising it.
That’s why we can genuinely believe we chose a washing machine because of its features, the price or the energy rating. Those things matter. But they aren’t necessarily what made one model stand out more than another.
