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The authors hypothesize that consumers enjoy their indulgences as much when they have a legitimate reason as when they do not, in contrast to what their own naive theories would predict. As the conceptual model specifies, when consuming hedonic goods or services, people are drawn toward aspects of the consumption, such as features of the goods, services, or consumption environment. In contrast, when making a decision or when evaluating decisions after they have been made, people base their judgments on accessible general knowledge and beliefs because they have no direct access to details of the hedonic experience of past or future consumption episodes.

This article documents consistent discrepancies among consumers’ predicted, actual, and remembered feelings related to indulgence episodes, and it conceptualizes the underlying processes. Consistent with previous research, consumers expect more negative and less positive feelings when they indulge without a reason than when they indulge with a reason (Study 1) or when they indulge as a consolation for poor performance rather than as a reward for high effort (Study 2). However, episodic reports of indulging experiences pertaining to the last indulgence episode show no influence of having versus not having a reason (Study 1) on experienced feelings, nor do concurrent reports show a difference between indulging as a consolation versus a reward (study 2). When asked how they “usually” feel when indulging with versus without a reason (Study 3), consumers’ global memories of indulging experiences are consistent with their expectations rather than their actual experience.

In combination, our findings suggest that consumers’ beliefs are erroneous. Indulgence is enjoyable independent of the presence or absence of a good justification or of the specific reason (e.g., reward versus consolation) used as a justification. Yet, feelings and sensory pleasures are accessible to introspection only while they are experienced and need to be reconstructed on the basis of episodic or semantic information after they dissipate. As a result, consumers’ memories of indulging experience may erroneously “confirm” their expectations (of how they would experience or how they must have experienced), impeding learning from actual experience. The authors speculate about the conditions under which consumers learn from their experience and the implications for consumer decision making and consumer welfare. 

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Jing Xu is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. She received a PhD in marketing from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 2007. Professor Xu’s research interests focus on expected, remembered versus experienced utility and the implications for consumer judgment and decision making and consumer welfare.

Norbert Schwarz is Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Professor of Marketing in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and a research professor at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. He received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research interests focus on human judgment and cognition, including the interplay of feeling and thinking; the socially situated nature of cognition; and the implications of basic cognitive and communicative processes for public opinion, consumer behavior, and social science research.

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