Student Presenter(s): Saniya Ratnani
Faculty Mentor: Coleen Kirk
Department: Management
School/College: School of Management, New York City

The COVID-19 pandemic related mandates have disrupted consumer behavior. A surge in consumer interest in do-it-yourself activities and hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic has been well documented (Kirk and Rifkin 2020). Consumers waited too long to find yeast for bread making and tools for home hair dyeing, and they were also intimidated by dalgona coffee. Nonetheless, consumer motivations for picking up new hobbies during the pandemic are less recognized. The purpose of this study is to examine how consumers adopted new hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do they feel "ownership" of the hobby they acquired? How did consumers switch to their new hobby or habits during the global crisis? However, psychological ownership can also elicit territorial responses, in which individuals react defensively when they feel that their psychological ownership of a good is threatened by others' signals of ownership (Kirk, 2017; Kirk, Peck, and Swain, 2018). We propose that two of the Big Five personality domains (Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann Jr 2003), and dual-process control (Rothbaum, Weisz, and Snyder 1982) theories, we propose that consumers are exploring new hobbies during the Pandemic in order to occupy themselves during the time saved and to satisfy the need for taking control. Preliminary findings will be presented at the conference.