Social Sensibility

Consumer Behavior and Social Health

From birth, people start demonstrating subconscious and conscious consumer behavior. Typically, parents and the education system begin teaching children how to develop active social understanding based on mechanisms of positive social reproduction, which include an economy of consumption. Growing up and aging influence a person's social sensibility toward consumption as a reflection of the complex processes of intergenerational influence, enculturation, and socialization, as well as of the place of every individual in society. The roots of modern consumption go back to the 18th-century “consumer revolution” as a move away from the subsistence economies of the earlier century and as an extraordinary growth in the world of goods. The development of a consumer society is based upon an important characteristic of consumption: consumption is not compelled since the consumer's decisions are free choices.

J. Schulkin promoted his theory about the psychological roots of social sensibility in humans’ intentionality. He distinguishes three layers of intentional systems that refer to (1) events, (2) beliefs, and (3) desires.

The consumer's social sensibility relates, in particular, to product values. P. Laaksonen provides a case study of shampoo consumption to define four aspects of consumption values: hedonistic (pleasure), personal (self-confidence and self-image), social (good relationships with others and social acceptance and responsibility for the environment), and values expressing the more utilitarian aspects of consumption (economy and easy living).

There are national tendencies in the development of consumers’ social sensibility. According to some statistics, primarily English-speaking countries (such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have low household saving rates, high financial assets, low real assets, high consumption levels, and low Engle coefficients (defined as the budget share of food and nonalcoholic beverages). They differ from Japan and some European countries like France, Germany, and Italy in that these countries are characterized by high household saving rates, high real assets, low consumption levels, and high Engle coefficients. Furthermore, consumerism in culture has been expanding globally and influencing more and more countries, like Singapore, for instance. Then, it is possible to conceptualize social sensibility regarding consumer culture (the work-and-spend model) as a global aspect defined in the past as “Westernization.”

Commercialization of leisure (as uncoerced activity undertaken during free time) is an essential feature of the consumer society that challenges social health and sustainable living by decreasing the opportunities for people to escape the financial dependence of their lives.

Social Sensibility and Sustainable Living

From an anthropological perspective, one possible analysis of social sensibility is within the triad of interrelations between consumer behavior, the ideology of garbage, and sustainable living.

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