Is customer satisfaction higher when we buy from attractive salespeople?
is study assesses if the service worker's physical attractiveness has an impact on customer satisfaction in the moment of truth. An experimental approach, involving two different service settings (visiting a bookstore and traveling with an airline), was used to manipulate the level of the service worker's physical attractiveness. The results, for both experiments, show that a high level as opposed to a low level of physical attractiveness of the service worker produced a higher level of customer satisfaction. In addition,…
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How does the weather affect your shopping habits?
ere has been a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that weather affects consumer decision making. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence to explain how the weather affects consumer spending and we detail the psychological mechanism that underlies this phenomenon. Specifically, we propose that the effect of weather – and, in particular, sunlight – on consumer spending is mediated by negative affect. That is, as exposure to sunlight increases, negative affect decreases and consumer spending tends to increase.…
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Can you tell if a politician is liberal or conservative just by looking at them?
ur studies demonstrated that perceivers were able to identify the political attitudes of unknown politicians on a left–right dimension when the targets were merely shown in photographs. In Study 1, party membership provided an objective criterion for political attitudes, whereas actual voting behavior served as a validity criterion in Studies 2, 3a, and 3b. All studies yielded ratings highly chance accuracy. Additional ratings suggest that perceived dominance may partly account for the effect. Moreover, perceivers were more accurate when they…
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Do firm muscles equal firm willpower?
ross five studies, we show that firming one’s muscles can help firm willpower and firmed willpower mediates people’s ability to withstand immediate pain, overcome tempting food, consume unpleasant medicines, and attend to immediately disturbing but essential information, provided doing so is seen as providing long term benefits. We draw on theories of embodied cognition to explain our results, and we add to that literature by showing for a first time that our bodies can help firm willpower and facilitate self-regulation…
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Does seeing the word “sale” make you less likely to comparison shop?
implement a simple two-shop search model in the laboratory with the aim to investigate if consumers behave differently in equivalent situations, where prices are displayed either as net prices or as gross prices with discounts. We compare treatments, where we either depict the known price of the first shop or the initially uncertain price of the second shop as a gross price with a discount, with treatments without discounts. We find that subjects search less in both treatments with…
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Would you know a psychopath if you saw one?
is study is the first to demonstrate that features of psychopathy can be reliably and validly detected by lay raters from “thin slices” (i.e., small samples) of behavior. Brief excerpts (5 s, 10 s, and 20 s) from interviews with 96 maximum-security inmates were presented in video or audio form or in both modalities combined. Forty raters used these excerpts to complete assessments of overall psychopathy and its Factor 1 and Factor 2 components, various personality disorders, violence proneness, and…
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Is it really hunger and tasty food driving you to eat?
is research examines the extent to which people accurately report some of the external influences on their food intake. Design: In two studies, specific factors (the presence and behavior of others) were manipulated in order to influence the amount of food that individuals consumed. Main Outcome Measures: The main outcomes of interest were participants' spontaneously generated explanations for their food intake (Study 1; n = 122), and their ratings of the importance of several potential determinants of food intake (Study…
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Can which products are next to each other on a store shelf influence what you buy?
is research demonstrates the strong influence of disgust in a consumer context. Specifically, it shows how consumer evaluations may change in response to physical contact with products that elicit only moderate levels of disgust. Using evidence from six studies, the authors develop a theory of product contagion, in which disgusting products are believed to transfer offensive properties through physical contact to other products they touch, thus influencing evaluations. Source: "Product Contagion: Changing Consumer Evaluations Through Physical Contact with “Disgusting” Products"…
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