This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Americans have long expressed their political views with their wallets.

In recent months, this has ramped up with boycotts and with buycotts.

That's where people express support by buying a company's products.

For months now, Nordstrom has been on a list of Trump-affiliated companies to boycott.

This is just, it's a wonderful line, I own some of it.

I fully, I'm going to just give it, I'm going to give a free commercial here, go buy it today, everybody.

I deleted Uber recently due to what happened at JFK Airport when it appeared that Uber

was essentially trying to break the strides.

Fueled the outrage and led to some people to call for a boycott of the airline.

It seems like people are a little fed up and disillusioned with sort of conventional political

channels where they would normally sort of express their political views.

And so in the absence of that legitimacy, there's been sort of a rise in political consumerism.

When E.R. Paharia is a marketing professor at Georgetown University, she studies how consumer

behavior often serves psychological needs rather than economic needs.

When we think about the way we spend money, we may think about the comfort of a nice pair

of shoes or the pleasure of a great meal.

But money also serves a deeper purpose.

We use money to express our feelings, to project our status, to defend our values.

The products we buy tell stories, stories that we tell others, stories,

that we tell ourselves.

For a small coffee shop, people don't really think much of the political situation.

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