The relationship between personality and consumption has not been fully investigated in the discipline of Consumer Behavior since previous studies showed that personality is not useful to predict consumption patterns. Challenging this assumption, Mowen (2000) proposes the 3M Model, which assumes that personality can be used to predict behaviors. This study investigate participation in sports and fashion habits of 863 students of a Brazilian city, showing good reliability of the scales and empirical support to the basic study assumptions. Compound and situational traits also had significant effects on category-specific surface traits, supporting research hypotheses and empirically sustaining the idea of a hierarchical structure of personality traits. Overall, the theoretical models designed to explain participation in sports and fashion clothing habits, as superficial personality traits, were able to account for a mean of 68% of these constructs’ variance.
The 3M Model; personality traits; consumption; fashion; sports
