I've come to observe that most men detest shopping. (My definition of "shopping" is spending the day with my friends, looking for fashion items, comparing prices, colors, fit, or whether to buy now or later, etc.). At first glance, this fact is puzzling: men and women both have needs that can be satisfied by exchanging money for goods. Financial shortages as a factor can be excluded, since couples usually share finances; also, it's common knowledge that men from all economic levels dislike shopping. So why do men hate shopping? Do women like having their needs met better than men? Or are there other factors coming into play?.
After discussing this issue with my friends, I came up with several hypotheses about why men hate shopping. One of my male friends, who experienced horrible childhood shopping trips with his authoritarian mother (who, when the children misbehaved, would yell at them and furtively pinch them), suggested that perhaps the problem was the negative connotations men associated with shopping as a result of these experiences. I then hypothesized that men have been classically conditioned to dislike shopping: Shopping was paired with being yelled at and pinched (the unconditional stimuli); the unconditioned response was an aversion to shopping. When the boys grew into adulthood, the yelling and pinching were eliminated, but shopping had become the conditioned stimulus, and so the conditioned response was to still hate it. Additionally, the fact that their mothers didn't seem to enjoy the activity very much, either, as they were usually extremely bad-tempered while shopping, made an impression on the children. It seems to me that this is a logical assumption; since a major part of who we are is a result of what we learn in our childhood, shopping can become associated with negative emotions and behaviors.
We also hypothesized that men receive more pleasure from task completion and little pleasure from social interaction while completing that task.