A Subtle Manifestation of Stereotypes? Investigating Conspicuous Consumption

Scientific Essay from the year 2022 in the subject Sociology - Individual Groups Society grade: 10 Copenhagen Business School language: English abstract: The objective of our study is twofold. Firstly we aim to enhance the understanding of intergroup conflict in particular to illuminate subtle manifestations of discrimination that follow from ambiguous feelings toward outgroups. Secondly we follow Crusius et al.'s (2012) call for addressing the underlying psychological mechanisms that shape economic behavior here in precise the phenomenon of CC. For this purpose we adopt a sociological perspective on prejudice which allows us to consider how individual psychology and behavior might be driven by social structures specifically intergroup relations. We integrate theories of cognitive automatisms emotions stereotype formation and group identity into a holistic framework and propose an empirical study to test the model. By doing so we attempt to answer the following research question: Can conspicuous consumption in some cases be identified as a group-based bias mediated by envy?