Consumer Psychology Guide (Free PDF)
Seven fields explain most of how people notice, remember, feel, shortcut, follow, repeat and choose. Each comes with one published study and a link to the full article.
Answer to the question
What Does a Consumer Psychology PDF Cover?
A consumer psychology PDF covers seven fields: attention, memory, emotion, heuristics and biases, social influence, habit and choice architecture. This guide gives each one a plain-words explanation, one published study and a link to the full article, with a one-page table that sums up all seven.
Key takeaways
- In the 1999 study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, noticing an unexpected object in a dynamic scene depended on its similarity to the other objects and on the difficulty of the main task, and not on its closeness to the place being watched.
- In the 1993 study by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, the length of a film clip had almost no effect on judgments of the whole clip, which followed a weighted average of the moments.
- In the 2008 study by Cynthia Cryder and colleagues, sadness was linked to higher spending only when self-focus was high.
- In the 2010 study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues, 96 volunteers repeated a daily behaviour for 12 weeks, and the time to reach 95 per cent of a plateau of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days.
- In 2003 Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein compared consent systems and found large differences between opt-out and opt-in designs, a strong case for the power of defaults and not a measured size for them.
Cathy Neal, Pascale Quester and Del Hawkins organise their textbook Consumer Behaviour around one model, in which influences from outside and inside the buyer feed a five-stage decision process. This [consumer psychology](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-is-consumer-psychology) PDF keeps that logic and cuts it into seven short fields, each with one published finding and a link to the full article.
Every finding names its researchers and says what the study did, because a guide is only worth keeping if it can be checked, and each field is written for a reader who is new to the subject. The whole guide is offered as a free consumer psychology PDF for reading offline.
How do shoppers notice and remember things?
Attention: what gets in at all
A shopper cannot weigh what never reached awareness, so attention comes first in any consumer psychology PDF. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris tested it in 1999 by showing observers dynamic scenes while they were busy with a task and asking whether they noticed an unexpected object or event. Noticing depended on how similar the newcomer was to the other objects on display and on how hard the main task was. Its closeness to the place being watched made no difference, which the authors read as a sign that people attend to objects and events and not to positions.
Packaging, shelves and web pages all compete for a busy person, and What is inattentional blindness gives the wider research on how an occupied viewer misses what sits in plain view. The useful question to put to any layout is what that person will actually see.
Memory: what stays after the visit
Customers carry away a summary, not a recording. In experiments by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, participants watched pleasant and unpleasant film clips that varied in length and intensity. People rated how they felt moment by moment, then judged each clip as a whole. The length of a clip had almost no effect on the overall judgment, which followed a weighted average of the moments instead, and length counted for even less when people judged from memory.
Why You Remember the End of a Holiday follows the idea into travel and leisure. For anyone designing a visit, a delivery or a service, the remembered experience is not the total of the lived one, and the practical question is what the customer will recall, which may differ from what the visit contained.
How do feeling and shortcuts steer a choice?
Emotion: the mood a buyer brings
Emotion in consumer psychology covers the moods a person carries into a choice as well as the feelings a product stirs, and Does retail therapy work asks what mood-led purchases do for the buyer. Whether sad people pay more for a product was the question Cynthia Cryder and colleagues put, using real goods and real money. The effect appeared only when self-focus was high, and at high levels self-focus accounted for the link between sadness and spending. The authors drew on the idea of the material self.
Heuristics and biases: shortcuts under uncertainty
Three heuristics were described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1974. Representativeness is used when people judge whether something belongs to a class, availability when they judge how common or how plausible something is, and adjustment from an anchor when a starting value is at hand. These shortcuts save effort and usually serve well, the authors wrote, yet they produce errors that are systematic and predictable.
Anchoring is used in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available, so a number met early can shape the estimate that follows. A bias is what shows when a shortcut is applied where it fits poorly. Why the First Price You See Decides What You Pay applies the anchor to pricing, and What is the availability heuristic covers the second shortcut in detail.
What do other people, routine and settings change?
Social influence: what people like me do
Social influence covers the ways other people's behaviour, real or implied, change what a buyer does, and What is social proof in marketing sets out the general idea. Two field experiments run by Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius used signs that asked hotel guests to join a conservation programme. Appeals built on what most guests do, such as reusing towels, outperformed a conventional appeal that spoke only of protecting the environment. The norm worked best when it described people in the guests' own setting, which the authors call provincial norms. The result fits the wider idea that buyers take cues from others like them.
For a shop, a page or a pack, the practical test that follows is whether the people a message points to look like the person reading it.
Habit: what repeats without deciding
Repeat purchases at a regular shop or time of day are habits in the plain sense: behaviour cued by its context and performed with little deliberation. A study led by Phillippa Lally followed 96 volunteers who each chose a daily eating, drinking or activity behaviour and did it in the same context for 12 weeks, rating habit strength and logging performance each day. The time to reach 95 per cent of each person's plateau of automaticity, the point where the behaviour had become as automatic as it would get, ranged from 18 to 254 days. Missing a single opportunity did not materially affect the process.
How Long a New Habit Really Takes follows the study through. For anyone studying repeat purchase, the spread is the point, since the same kind of behaviour became automatic at very different speeds.
Choice architecture: the setting of the decision
Choice architecture is the way options are arranged and pre-set when a decision is made, and a default is the option that applies if the person does nothing; What is choice architecture shows how designers apply the idea to shops, websites and forms.
National data and experiments on consent to organ donation were the basis of a 2003 comparison by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein. Systems that presume consent unless a person opts out showed large differences in registered consent from systems that ask people to opt in. The authors presented this as evidence that default options can produce striking differences in expressed preference. Whole systems differ in other ways too, so the comparison makes a strong case for the power of defaults without giving a measured size for them.
What is in a consumer psychology PDF?
This consumer psychology PDF closes with the seven fields side by side, each with its question, its finding and the article to read next.
| Field | What it asks | One finding | Read next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attention | What gets noticed at all | Noticing an unexpected object depended on its similarity to the display and on the difficulty of the main task (Simons and Chabris, 1999) | What is inattentional blindness |
| Memory | What stays after the visit | Clip length had almost no effect on judgments of the whole clip (Fredrickson and Kahneman, 1993) | Why You Remember the End of a Holiday |
| Emotion | What mood the buyer brings | Sadness was linked to higher spending only when self-focus was high (Cryder and colleagues, 2008) | Does retail therapy work |
| Heuristics and biases | Which shortcut is in play | Three heuristics: representativeness, availability and anchoring (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) | What is the availability heuristic |
| Social influence | Whom the buyer looks to | Appeals built on what most guests do beat a conventional appeal (Goldstein and colleagues, 2008) | What is social proof in marketing |
| Habit | What repeats without deciding | Time to reach 95 per cent of a plateau of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days (Lally and colleagues, 2010) | How Long a New Habit Really Takes |
| Choice architecture | How the setting frames the choice | Opt-out consent systems showed large differences from opt-in ones (Johnson and Goldstein, 2003) | What is choice architecture |
Before a campaign, a page or a pack goes out, put the seven questions to it in order. What will the person notice, what will they remember, what mood will they bring, which shortcut does the setting invite, whom will they look to, what do they already do by habit, and what is the default. Work through the guide one field at a time, with the full article open beside it.
Common questions
What does a consumer psychology PDF cover?
This consumer psychology PDF covers seven fields: attention, memory, emotion, heuristics and biases, social influence, habit and choice architecture. Each has a plain-words explanation, one published study and a link to the full article.
Is the consumer psychology PDF free?
Yes. The guide is offered as a free consumer psychology PDF that carries the same text and table as the page.
Does one study settle a consumer psychology question?
No. Each field rests on a larger body of work, and a consumer psychology PDF can only introduce it. The guide names one study per field so the claim can be checked, and the linked articles go further.
Sources
Neal, C. M., Quester, P. G., & Hawkins, D. I. Consumer Behaviour. Seed book; vault hub Books/Consumer Behaviour.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). “Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events.” Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074. doi:10.1068/p281059 https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059
Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). “Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45-55. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45
Cryder, C. E., Lerner, J. S., Gross, J. J., & Dahl, R. E. (2008). “Misery is not miserly: Sad and self-focused individuals spend more.” Psychological Science, 19(6), 525-530. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02118.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02118.x
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). “Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.” Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). “A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels.” Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 472-482. doi:10.1086/586910 https://doi.org/10.1086/586910
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674 https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). “Do defaults save lives?” Science, 302(5649), 1338-1339. doi:10.1126/science.1091721 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091721