Eyes wide shopped: shopping situations trigger arousal in impulsive buyers

Benjamin G Serfas; Oliver B Büttner; Arnd Florack

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0114593

Eyes wide shopped: shopping situations trigger arousal in impulsive buyers

PLoS One. 2014 Dec 9;9(12):e114593. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0114593. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Benjamin G Serfas¹, Oliver B Büttner², Arnd Florack¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Applied Psychology: Work, Education, and Economy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
² Department of Applied Psychology: Work, Education, and Economy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; Department of Economic Sciences, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Abstract

The present study proposes arousal as an important mechanism driving buying impulsiveness. We examined the effect of buying impulsiveness on arousal in non-shopping and shopping contexts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we measured pupil dilation while participants viewed and rated pictures of shopping scenes and non-shopping scenes. The results demonstrated that buying impulsiveness is closely associated with arousal as response to viewing pictures of shopping scenes. This pertained for hedonic shopping situations as well as for utilitarian shopping situations. Importantly, the effect did not emerge for non-shopping scenes. Furthermore, we demonstrated that arousal of impulsive buyers is independent from cognitive evaluation of scenes in the pictures.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Arousal*
Emotions / physiology
Female
Humans
Impulsive Behavior / physiology*
Male
Ocular Physiological Phenomena*
Pupil / physiology

Grants and funding

This work was supported by a Marie Curie FP7 Integration Grant within the 7th European Union Framework Program to Oliver B. Büttner (FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG 293577). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.