The charity workers staking out your favorite holiday shopping
site with collection cups in hand may have chosen the exact
right spot to prick your conscience, a new study suggests. It’s
not that you feel guilty for your purchasing power. It’s about
the weight of your shopping bags. Researchers found that when we
are physically weighed down, with anything from groceries to
gifts, our thoughts inescapably turn to serious -- weighty --
subjects. Apparently, the wiring in our brain sparks directly
from physical weight to psychological weight. When we’re toting
a big haul, we're more likely to be suddenly struck by the
importance of current events or issues in the world around us,
according to the report published in the Journal of Consumer
Behavior. “We found that carrying a heavy load leads consumers
to feel an unrelated event as being more important and more
stressful,” said the study’s lead author Meng Zhang, an
assistant professor in the department of marketing at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. For the