Same flow, different outcomes: Bridging the divide between environmental and consumer studies
For the past six years, we have been investigating how flow experiences can contribute to delivering sustainable prosperity. In this blog, Amy Isham reflects on the tensions that arise in the treatment of flow across disciplines, using findings from her recent journal articles.
Blog by AMY ISHAM
What is flow? Put simply, flow describes an experience of total immersion in an activity. A person is engaged in their activity and in that moment nothing else seems to matter. An individual ‘in flow’ is completely concentrated, feels in control, often loses track of time, and may forget about everyday concerns. Despite requiring high levels of concentration, people’s actions during flow can begin to feel effortless as they are not aware of conscious effort to initiate them. Being in flow is incredibly enjoyable and frequent or intense experiences of flow have been shown to lead to more positive emotions, greater life satisfaction, and stronger feelings of fulfilment.
Over the last six years, alongside my collaborators Tim Jackson and Birgitta Gatersleben, I have been exploring the relevance of flow for one of our core aims at CUSP—to determine how we can have ‘more fun with less stuff’ or, alternatively put, to live better by acting in more sustainable ways. Together, we have published research documenting the typically low environmental impacts of the most flow-conducive activities, the factors that can undermine an individual’s ability to experience flow such as poor self-control and a desire to avoid uncomfortable states, and the accessibility of flow states across demographic groups. In upcoming work, we are beginning to document that frequent flow experiences could also encourage stronger pro-social and pro-ecological values.
Yet alongside our attempts to understand how flow can be used as a tool to promote sustainable prosperity for all, marketers and consumer psychologists have been employing flow states for quite different aims. Consumer psychologists recognise flow as an important factor that influences consumer experiences and behaviour, and it is being documented by consumer researchers that the experience of flow when shopping can lead to numerous commercial outcomes. These include a greater intention to revisit a store and more purchases being made. Given these proposed commercial benefits, research is now also attempting to locate specific features of stores and shopping experiences that can encourage flow within retail environments.
These efforts to utilise flow as a means of promoting increases in consumption are in stark contrast to our own intentions with flow. It also raises some questions around how our findings on flow within environmental studies may translate to the retail context. For instance, we previously documented that individuals holding strong materialistic values—that is those who place a lot of importance on acquiring money and material goods to boost their status and happiness—are less prone to experiencing flow. However, in this previous work, we were either looking at flow experiences in general across day-to-day life, or within specific types of activities that we considered to be more sustainable such as artwork or meditation. We had to wonder whether in a shopping context, materialistic values would still undermine flow in the same way. Given that shopping is an activity well liked and valued by highly materialistic individuals, we even had to consider that materialism could encourage flow, and thus perhaps subsequent purchase behaviours, in this activity.
In our recent journal publication, we sought to experimentally test the impact of increasing the salience of materialistic values on flow experiences during online shopping activities. Despite hypothesising that increasing the salience of materialistic values and goals would lead participants to report higher-quality flow experiences in the online shopping activity, such an effort was not found. In fact, in line with our earlier work, strong materialistic values and goals still reduced the quality of flow experienced during the online shopping activity. So, the effect of materialism on flow appears to be consistent across contexts. However, we did replicate findings showing that the more participants experienced flow during the shopping activity, the more positive their attitude towards the e-store and the stronger their intention to make subsequent visits to (and purchases from) it.
The combination of these two findings means that both we, as environmental scientists, and those working within consumer research, need to take a more nuanced approach to our consideration of flow. We concluded in our previous research that reducing materialistic values may be an appropriate strategy for supporting flow experiences and sustainable outcomes. However, to reduce materialistic values within shopping environments could encourage flow and consequently, more purchase behaviours. Quite the opposite of our original intention. Equally, for consumer psychologists and marketers, retail environments are often designed to encourage materialistic goals, yet this may undermine the very commercial outcomes they seek to create, by limiting opportunities for flow. Ultimately, what we can see is how one type of action or, in this case, psychological experience can easily be co-opted for different uses and outcomes across fields.
Such a dynamic is not unique to flow. In our forthcoming article, Patrick Elf, Dario Leoni, and I discuss how the practice of mindfulness and use of psychedelic substances both hold great potential for delivering transformations in wellbeing and pro-environmental worldviews. Yet, at the same time, they are also being used by businesses as a means of enhancing employee productivity (and thus, output) and reinforcing neoliberal principles. Accordingly, no practice may be universally or intrinsically beneficial for sustainable prosperity. Rather, we need to pay close attention to where, how, and with what intentions practices are being implemented to ensure that what could be great tools for supporting sustainable transitions, are not relegated to encouraging the status quo.
