Feeling Sleepy and How It Affects Consumer Variety Seeking

Abstract

Lack of sleep is a widespread problem. An extensive amount of research has revealed the negative impact of sleep deprivation on health, but no research to date has investigated how it may influence consumer behavior. The present investigation fills this void by uncovering a novel impact of sleepiness on consumer variety-seeking behavior. Using various methods, we observed that consumers who felt sleepier tended to seek more variety. This effect was found to be driven by a desire for sensation to maintain wakefulness. The effect was diminished when sleepy consumers believed that being alert was no longer necessary, and when they were able to satisfy their need for sensation via other means. We consider the effect of sleepiness on variety seeking uncovered in this research to be somewhat non-intuitive, in the sense that, a priori, one might think that feeling sleepy would be more likely to decrease, rather than to increase, exploratory behavior. Implications of the findings for different research areas are discussed.