New Ideas Concerning Arts and Social Studies Vol. 9

Social platforms have absorbed functions that once belonged to separate stages of the purchase process, so that discovery, evaluation, social validation and transaction now occur inside a single continuous scrolling session. Generation Z, the cohort whose consumer socialisation has taken place almost entirely within these environments, has become the population through which marketing scholarship examines this compression. The resulting literature has expanded quickly, yet it remains conceptually uneven, methodologically homogeneous and geographically concentrated. This critical narrative review evaluates that body of work and asks what can defensibly be claimed about the psychological and social mechanisms connecting feed exposure to purchase among young consumers. Literature was identified through structured searching of Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Semantic Scholar, OpenAIRE, EconBiz and Google Scholar, supplemented by backward and forward citation searching and verification of bibliographic records against publisher and registry sources. The synthesis is organised around five analytical problems: the contested status of the generational cohort as an explanatory variable; the affordances of short-form video and algorithmic curation that sustain immersive attention; the social influence mechanisms of source credibility, parasocial attachment and peer communication; the affective route through anticipated regret, scarcity and impulse; and the counter-currents of scepticism, fatigue, privacy concern and anti-consumption. Evidence is strongest for the proposition that platform design features reliably elevate immediate purchase impulses and that perceived influencer credibility and congruence shape brand evaluation. Evidence is considerably weaker for claims that these effects are distinctively generational, that intention translates into purchase, or that observed relationships persist beyond the survey moment. The dominant reliance on cross-sectional self-report designs, single-country convenience samples and composite-based structural models constrains causal and predictive inference. Priorities for future work include cohort-sequential and behavioural-trace designs, registered replication across markets, and measurement work that separates platform affordance from generational membership.