The Sweet Payoff

From Rob Walker's always-insightful Consumed column:

Mintel surveyed chocolate buyers last year, and 12 percent actually admitted to the motive “I was sad or stressed.” But the most popular answers were “I had a chocolate craving” and the unenlightening “No particular reason.” Maybe there’s a factor we don’t even recognize prodding us to buy premium chocolate, and it arises not despite the drumbeat of threatening financial news but because of it. Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University have lately been exploring the relationship between feelings of powerlessness and what they term “compensatory consumption.”

New York Times Magazine