New locomotives of luxury consumption: Social media, anxiety, and self

Social media has become an integral part of today's lifestyle and a pervasive part of modern culture, which not only has the potential to transform users' consumption behaviour but may also affect mental health. The reviewed literature revealed that the findings of previous studies on the relationship between social media use and psychological distress are contradictory (Seabrook et al., 2016). Meanwhile, no study has yet addressed the position of psychological distress in the relationship between social media and luxury consumption. This study aims to explore the existing contradictory findings in literature regarding the relationship between social media use and anxiety; more importantly, it focuses on indirect effects of social media use on luxury consumption tendency and whether the indirect conditional effect of social media use on luxury consumption tendency varies on the magnitude of the actual ideal self-discrepancy. With this focus, an online questionnaire was used as a subjective self-report to collect the data required to test the research model. A total of 488 samples from the statistical population in Turkey obtained in this study were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software and the SPSS PROCESS macro model (Hayes, 2017). The results of the moderated mediation analysis model 7 of Andrew Hayes showed that social networking sites and psychological distress are positively associated, and severe social media use leads to more anxiety. Additionally, the results indicated that social media use both directly and indirectly affects the luxury consumption tendency of social media users through inducing anxiety. Ultimately, moderation analysis indicated that actual-ideal self-discrepancy does not moderate the effects of social media use on anxiety and that the effects of social media use on users' tendency to consume luxury goods do not vary on the level and magnitude of actual-ideal self-discrepancy. This study makes contribution to understanding the effects of social media use on mental health and luxury consumption tendency goods. The study concludes with a discussion of findings, theoretical and practical implications, and suggestions for future study. Keywords: Social media, Self-discrepancy, Anxiety, Luxury consumption