Self-insight, Self-concept Clarity, Gullibility, Celebrity Admiration & Compulsive Buying.

Compulsive buying is a widespread problem in American society with often devastating consequences. A measure of compulsive buying, along with four measures believed to be related to each other, gullibility, celebrity worship, selfinsight, and self-concept clarity, based on previous research, were administered. Results indicated that all five measures were related to each other. Specifically, we found that self-insight and self-concept clarity were positively related to each other (.73, p<.01), and negatively related to gullibility, celebrity worship, and compulsive buying. We also predicted and found that compulsive buying was positively correlated with celebrity worship (.22, p<.01) and gullibility (.15, p<.05). We further predicted that scores on self-insight, self-concept clarity, gullibility, and celebrity worship measures would combine to predict compulsive buying in a stepwise multiple regression analysis. Selfinsight proved to be the best predictor of compulsive buying (beta = -.30); addition of the celebrity worship (beta = .16) measure resulted in a total explained variance of 13 %. The discussion focuses on why the other predictors added little to the predictive model. Further validation for the relatively new brief measure of celebrity worship and the importance of the role of psychological assessment in the context of compulsivity were noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]