Blog posts on consumer decision making by Sentient Decision Science, a global leader in implicit research.
Understanding hot-state decision making can provide a significant short-term boon in purchase behavior. But ethically, and from a long-term business health perspective, we don’t want to sacrifice long-term consumer satisfaction for short-term reward. The first note of solace on the ethical front is this: people do not respond emotionally to things they don’t value. Thus, […]
When consumers encounter promotions while shopping, they are compelled to act on their visceral impulses. At Sentient Decision Science, we call this compulsion hot-state decision making. Hot-states lead to a reduction in immediate self-control (Loewenstein, 2000), and many marketing campaigns emphasize immediate action with hot phrases like “One day only!” and “Call now!”
Surely who we choose for a sexual partner is based on our conscious preferences, right? Perhaps not as much as you think. Apparently, the power of the subconscious is so substantial that male preference for romantic partners is dependent on how much change ($) we have in our pockets at the time of evaluating a […]
Some choices are hard to make, especially when the options we are faced with are nearly equivalent. Nevertheless we manage to make decisions every day and, buyer’s remorse notwithstanding, we frequently feel satisfied with our choices. And those previously attractive alternatives? Well, we tell ourselves, they were somehow lacking anyway. But have we arrived at that conclusion through rational consideration of each alternative’s objective value, or do we subjectively—and retroactively—adjust the value we place on rejected options in order to feel better about the choice we made?
In 1996, behavioral psychologists Ulf Dimberg and Arne Öhman sought to test if the human mood is independent from its immediate external environment. Their study, Behold the wrath: Psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli investigated the affect of primed facial gestures on the participant’s mood. When I present these findings in talks, I usually tease that […]