Compassionate Love, Agape, and Altruism: A New Framework for Understanding and Supporting Impoverished Consumers

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Abstract
This article advances the premise that other-centered love is a resource that may improve the lives of impoverished consumers. It opens with a brief description of compassionate love, agape, and altruism and their potential relationship to helping behaviors. Data description and analysis are next, followed by ethnographic evidence that support the love-as-resource perspective. This support is distilled into five interrelated themes: loss/lack of familial/friendship love, lack of other-centered love or disdain, reactions to the loss/lack of love, expressions of other-centered love, and consumption adequacy. The article closes with implications for other-centered love as a paradigm to further the consumption adequacy of the poor on a global basis.