Hard to Ignore: Impulsive Buyers Show an Attentional Bias in Shopping Situations.

Author(s)
Oliver Büttner, Arnd Florack, Helmut Leder, Matthew Arthur Paul, Benjamin Serfas, Anna Maria Schulz
Abstract

This research focuses on the attentional processes that underlie buying impulsiveness. It was hypothesized that impulsive buyers are more likely than nonimpulsive buyers to get distracted by products that are unrelated to their shopping goal. The study applied a 2 (buying impulsiveness low vs. high) ﰀ 2 (shopping vs. nonshopping context) ﰀ 2 (product vs. nonsemantic distractors) mixed design. Participants’ attention allocation was measured via eye tracking during a visual distraction paradigm. The results support the distraction hypothesis. Impulsive buyers allocated less attention to a focal product than nonimpulsive buyers. The effect was context-specific and emerged only when the task was framed as a shopping situation. The results show that distraction is not limited to attractive products and suggest that it is driven by a general attentional openness for products in shopping situations.

Organisation(s)
Department of Occupational, Economic and Social Psychology, Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology
Journal
Social Psychological and Personality Science
Volume
5
Pages
343-351
No. of pages
9
ISSN
1948-5506
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550613494024
Publication date
06-2013
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
501021 Social psychology
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/hard-to-ignore-impulsive-buyers-show-an-attentional-bias-in-shopping-situations(44455a78-240c-4b42-8c69-837efeede736).html