UC Riverside

Despite the association between affiliation tendencies and hunger, surprisingly little is known if and how hunger – a bodily feeling produced by a lack of food – informs the relative weight consumers place on satisfying their need for similarity versus their need for distinctiveness. We argue and show that high versus low hunger heightens consumers’ self-protective motives, intensifying their need to belong, and in turn strengthening their preferences for options signaling similarity to others. In support of our theory, further results show that the effect is attenuated when others to whom to signal similarity are absent; that is, in private (vs. public) consumption settings. Moreover, consistent with the hypothesized role of the need to belong, the effect of hunger on uniqueness-seeking is attenuated when the need to belong has been fulfilled; that is, in group (vs. individual) consumption settings.