Poverty and consumer psychology

Global and intractable poverty among certain peoples remains a vexing problem both within and across nations. There has been considerably more written about who lives in poverty, circumstances that capture their lived experiences, and resulting feeling states and behavioral reactions than about how they became impoverished in the first place. Some wish to blame the individuals themselves, while others look at structural inequities within societies. While rarely within the domain, or bandwidth, of consumer psychologists, research has had an impact on policy makers and other interested individuals who seek to solve intractable problems associated with poverty. Some of the difficulty arises from the dominant paradigm of researchers in the developed world surrounding individualism and responsibility, in which scholars focus on the self-help coping strategies that some consumers use when faced with impoverishment.