Resumo

The increase of indebtedness is one of the most common negative result, especially, for individuals classified as low income, who are the most vulnerable. Matos et al. (2019) suggest that the main key that explain indebtedness and connect emotional, psychological, and personality aspects of low income is materialism. Although materialism is a personal value, it is strong guided by a desired final state. Thus, to understand it deeply, it is important to evaluate the main nature of decision-making motivation that leads to materialism.

The real nature of low income consumer decision making process is still unclear. This paper aimed to analyse deeper behaviour nature to advance this field, expecting regulatory focus and construal level be strong predictors.

Two constructs from Social Psychology has demonstrated potential to explain consumers’ decisions. The first is regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997), which classifies decision-making motivations into: promotion and prevention orientations. The second one is construal level (Trope & Liberman, 2003), which defends that the way people understand the world is based in a high and low interpretation. In a high level, interpretation is more abstract, based on desire (desirability). In contrast, in a low level, people focus on details and in functional benefits of acquiring it.

This study has a quantitative approach. It is characterized as explanatory (Creswell, 2010). To achieve the purpose of this study, the experimental research with between subjects design is the more properly way. This study is also cross-sectional. It was conducted with a sample of 140 Brazilian low income consumers. The main techniques used to analyse the data collected in this study were descriptive statistics (frequencies, means and standard deviations), T-Student test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) two way.

We show low income consumers manipulated to promotion focus are not more prone to indebtedness than prevention ones. It is a counter-intuitive result. However, low-income individuals tend to be more cautious in trying to avoid shocks (Fullford, 2020). Based on it, we can observe that there is a relationship between income and valence self-regulation. Our results confirm low income consumer, in a distal situation, is more prone to indebtedness. Finally, we found that combination of regulatory focus and psychological distance was statistically lower than expected to explain indebtedness.

We conclude that high psychological distance — distal — increases low income consumer propensity to indebtedness, and we suggest that low income consumer is chronic oriented to prevention focus. Moreover, the combination of regulatory focus and psychological distance are not strong predictors of consumer propensity to indebtedness.

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