From Silver Screen to Explaining Dreams: the Effect of Cultural Text on Personal Consumption Narratives

Although Consumer Culture Theory has accounted for the use of personal narrative in daily life and examined the archetypal narrative of cultural products, it has yet to examine the interaction between the two types of narrative structures. Using a combination of archival analysis and depth interviews, I find that consumers systematically draw from cultural narratives of gambling (movie plots, characters’ experiences) differentially depending on the object and function of their stories. Personal narratives about one’s own experiences tend to draw from idiosyncratic stories of disillusionment while personal narratives about others’ experiences tend to draw from archetypal hero and loss-of-control scripts.

Citation:

Ashlee Humphreys (2011) ,"From Silver Screen to Explaining Dreams: the Effect of Cultural Text on Personal Consumption Narratives", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 86-87.