People who spend money on experiential purchases say they "like to act on a whim," "get caught up in the excitement when others are celebrating," and appear to be more emotionally affected by events. They score high on the "extravert" and "openness to new experience" facets of the Big Five. This personality profile makes sense since life experiences are inherently more social than material items, and experiences also contain an element of risk—if you try a new experience that you don't like, you can't return it to the store for a refund. Finally, as we expected, these habitual "experiential shoppers" reaped long-term benefits from their spending: they report greater life satisfaction.

Life experiences become part of who we are. They are woven into our memories, shape our identity, and are generally not replaceable or upgradeable. It comes as little surprise, then, that past work has shown that experiential purchases increase feelings of happiness. Our latest work shows that some people have preferences for experiential purchases and these individuals who are more experiential are happier, likely in part, because of how they spend their discretionary income.

At BeyondThePurchase.Org we are researching the connection between people's spending habits, happiness, and values. To learn about your spending habits and what influences your buying behavior, first Login or Register with Beyond The Purchase, then take our Experiential Buying Scale and our Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale. We think you may learn a lot about what causes you to part with your hard-earned money.