Construct · 4 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one label, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningcompulsive buyingcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to impulse buying is compulsive buying.
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The sudden, often powerful and hedonically complex urge to buy something right away, felt with reduced regard for the consequences. Rook's 1987 paper The Buying Impulse is the referent this map is measured against: he treated impulse buying as an in-the-moment experience rather than simply an unplanned purchase, marked by a spontaneous urge, a feeling of being swept along, and an emotional pull that can override careful thought. Beatty and Ferrell later modeled the in-store precursors of that urge, showing that time and money available, browsing, and positive feelings all feed it. The thing being named here is a state that happens in a shopper during a shopping trip, not a stable feature of the person and not a clinical condition. Every other meaning on this page borrows the word from this one.[1][3]
A person's standing tendency to buy on impulse, treated as a trait that varies between people and holds across situations. Rook and Fisher's 1995 study introduced a buying impulsiveness scale that scores this disposition, and reported that it predicts impulsive buying most strongly when a person judges acting on the urge to be appropriate. In this reading, impulse buying is one visible expression of broader trait impulsivity and weak self-regulation: Baumeister's Yielding to Temptation frames the impulse purchase as a self-control failure, a moment when the wish to buy wins out over a longer goal. What differs from the consumer-behavior meaning is the level of description. That page names an event; this one names a durable property of the buyer, closer to the self-regulation ideas covered under self-control.[2][4]
A pattern of chronic, repetitive buying that a person finds hard to control and that is linked to distress or harm, studied as a possible clinical condition rather than an ordinary shopping choice. Faber and O'Guinn's 1992 paper built a short screener to identify people whose buying fits this pattern, drawing a line between the general population and a much smaller group. This meaning sits at the edge of the map, where a consumer behavior shades into a clinical construct: compulsive buying is often driven by relief from negative feelings and marked by a sense of lost control, which is not the same as the pleasurable, one-off urge that Rook described. Treating the two as one construct is the central error this page warns against. The clinical literature keeps them separate because the causes, the course, and the appropriate response differ; nothing here is a diagnosis or advice.[5]
The urge to buy impulsively that is prompted by the design of an online store rather than by a physical shelf. Parboteeah, Valacich, and Wells's 2009 study asked which website characteristics raise a shopper's urge to buy on impulse, and found that task-relevant and mood-relevant cues both feed it, working through perceived usefulness and enjoyment. The underlying urge is the same state Rook named, but the setting and the triggers move from an in-store display and a salesperson to page layout, recommendations, and one-click checkout. Studies in this area often reuse the older urge measure while changing what is presumed to set it off. A finding about website cues therefore speaks to what triggers the urge online, not to whether online buyers differ as people.[6]
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