Priming the Buy Decision

Much, maybe most, of the cognitive effort that goes into purchase decisions is unavailable to consciousness. Epstein’s cognitive-experiential self theory describes this view in a way that generalizes beyond consumer behavior to cognition in general. Daniel Kahneman describes a similar view in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. If unconscious processes affect the decision to buy something then we should see effects of priming and the ideomotor effect. Priming is an implicit memory effect whereby exposure to a stimulus or concept affects responses to subsequent stimuli whether the respondent is consciously aware of the priming stimulus or not. The ideomotor effect is a type of priming whereby a behavioral action is affected by prior exposure to an associated stimulus or concept. The present study used a reaction time task developed specifically for consumer behavior research. This paradigm mimics some of the aspects of online shopping. Participants viewed photos of models wearing items of clothing. Their task was to decide if they would buy the item or not. This was a speeded task. The stimulus photo on each trial was preceded by two primes; a word prime and a photo prime. The word prime was either the word “buy” or a nonword and the photo prime was either a photo of someone paying for something (priming the concept “buy”) or a photo of a stone staircase (neutral). The hypothesis was that exposure to “buy” primes would facilitate the number and time course of “buy” decisions relative to exposure to neutral primes.