Minimally Indulgent: How Consumer Minimalism Signals High Self-Control
(A2026-134007)

AUTHORS

Stephanie Flout, EM Normandie Business School; Xiaoyan Deng, The Ohio State University; Yunhui Huang, School of Business Hong Kong Baptist University; Qiang Zhang, Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This research explores how others perceive minimalist consumers. Minimalism is an emerging consumption trend, yet there is limited research on consumer minimalism and its implications for consumers, marketers, and policymakers. We propose and demonstrate that minimalist consumers are perceived by others as having superior self-control abilities. This perception is reflected in making healthier eating and lifestyle choices and being generally better at self-control. The minimalist lifestyle, which involves minimal indulgent consumption and consistent denial of consumption rewards, leads people to infer that minimalist consumers tend to avoid indulgence. Consequently, this results in the perception of minimalist consumers having high self-control. We conducted six preregistered experiments to test our hypotheses. Due to space constraints, we report four of them.