Feeling a compulsion to spend money even though there is nothing you really need?

Dont worry, its just biology. The Australian Retailers Association predicts $14.8 billion will be spent in the coming weeks, helped along by human nature and the fear that if youre not in the shops, youre missing out.

As human beings, you assume that if lots of people want something, then we need to be part of it it is the scarcity effect basically, Dr Paul Harrison, a senior lecturer in consumer behaviour and advertising at the Deakin Graduate School of Business, said.

If lots of people want it, it has more value. If we are looking around and everyone is grabbing for towels, even if we dont need them, we feel that if we miss out which the whole scarcity thing is; well miss out on something important.

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That is part of what makes us human we are really responding to animal instincts at sale time and research has actually shown that a different form of thinking goes on in our brain when we see words like 'sale' or 'free'.

We actually over ride the rational part of our brain with the emotional part of our brain, so it is a chemical process as much as anything else.

That psychological response, Dr Harrison said, was helped along by marketing messages.

In a positive light, I would say that people tend to respond well to marketing messages, but in a negative light, you could probably argue that people have a tendency to look at what other people are doing and what messages are being broadcast to help us to make decisions; so if we are constantly being told that these sales are amazing and lots of people are going to go there, then theres a degree of behaviour which suggests maybe if I dont go, Ill miss out.

One of the really interesting things is the way retailers are saying it is not going to be a great year, it is only a growth of three to four percent, but in reality, that kind of growth is pretty good, we just got used to unreasonable amounts of growth from the early '90s until recently, particularly for retailers.

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Biology trumps good sense