Luxury consumption and the dark triad of personality

Consumption of luxury generates both psychological benefits and costs to consumers. The current work scrutinizes social costs of luxury goods consumption, namely how luxury brand consumers are perceived by observers. Across four experiments (N1A = 343, N1B = 374, N2 = 368, N3 = 113) employing diverse stimuli (brands and models), we tested the effect of luxury consumption on the perception of a consumer as possessing dark personality traits, mechanism explaining this effect and its boundary conditions. The results demonstrated that displaying luxury goods increases perception of consumer’s narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, but this effect is not universal (Study 1A and Study 1B). These social costs were driven by increases in the perception of consumers’ impression management especially in observers with high levels of sincerity (Study 2). Furthermore, observers’ consumer brand engagement moderated the effect of luxury consumption on their perception of dark triad of personality: individuals with higher (vs. lower) level of consumer brand engagement perceived luxury brand consumers as lower (vs. higher) in Machiavellianism and psychopathy (Study 3).