Individual differences in competent consumer choice: the role of cognitive reflection and numeracy skills

In this paper, we investigate whether cognitive reflection and numeracy skills affect the quality of the consumers’ decision-making process in a purchase decision context. In a first (field) experiment, an identical product was on sale in two shops with different initial prices and discounts. One of the two deals was better than the other and the consumers were asked to choose the best one and to describe which arithmetic operations they used to solve the problem; then they were asked to complete the numeracy scale (Lipkus et al., 2001). The choice procedures used by the consumers were classified as complete decision approach when all the arithmetic operations needed to solve the problem were computed, and as partial decision approach when only some operations were computed. A mediation model shows that higher numeracy is associated with use of the complete decision approach. In turn, this approach is positively associated with the quality of the purchase decision. Given that these findings highlight the importance of the decision processes, in a second (laboratory) experiment we used a supplementary method to study the type of information search used by the participants: eye-tracking. In this experiment the participants were presented with decision problems similar to those used in experiment 1 and they completed the Lipkus numeracy scale and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), (Frederick, 2005). Participants with a high CRT score chose the best deal more frequently, and showed a more profound and detailed information search pattern compared to participants with a low CRT score. Overall, results indicate that higher levels of cognitive reflection and numeracy skills predict the use of a more thorough decision process (measured with two different techniques: retrospective verbal reports and eye movements). In both experiments the decision process is a crucial factor which greatly affects the quality of the purchase decision

Does exposure to alternative decision rules change gaze patterns and behavioral strategies in games?

We run an eye-tracking experiment to investigate whether players change their gaze patterns and choices after they experience alternative models of choice in one-shot games. In phase 1 and 3, participants play 2 × 2 matrix games with a human counterpart; in phase 2, they apply specific decision rules while playing with a computer with known behavior. We classify participants in types based on their gaze patterns in phase 1 and explore attentional shifts in phase 3, after players were exposed to the alternative decision rules. Results show that less sophisticated players, who focus mainly on their own payoffs, change their gaze patterns towards the evaluation of others' incentives in phase 3. This attentional shift predicts an increase in equilibrium responses in relevant classes of games. Conversely, cooperative players do not change their visual analysis. Our results shed new light on theories of bounded rationality and on theories of social preferences

What your Facebook Profile Picture Reveals about your Personality

People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others. Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media provide a new forum for this fundamental process; hence, understanding people's behaviour on social media could provide interesting insights on their personality. In this paper we investigate automatic personality recognition from Facebook profile pictures. We analyze the effectiveness of four families of visual features and we discuss some human interpretable patterns that explain the personality traits of the individuals. For example, extroverts and agreeable individuals tend to have warm colored pictures and to exhibit many faces in their portraits, mirroring their inclination to socialize; while neurotic ones have a prevalence of pictures of indoor places. Then, we propose a classification approach to automatically recognize personality traits from these visual features. Finally, we compare the performance of our classification approach to the one obtained by human raters and we show that computer-based classifications are significantly more accurate than averaged human-based classifications for Extraversion and Neuroticism

Analisi di movimenti oculari nella risoluzione di problemi commerciali

Many daily purchase decisions, such as choosing the best deal, require the integration of various kinds of information. In most commercial scenarios the consumer has to manage and compare numerical information. The present study is driven by an important research question: “in a commercial scenario with a high numerical component, is numerical ability (e.g. numeracy) the only factor that influences the accuracy of decisions?”. The aim of the present paper is to understand if cognitive reflection drives the problem-solving process in these contexts. We examined attentional aspects by measuring eye movements using an SR Research Eye Link 1000 eye tracking device belonging to The Consumer Neuroscience Laboratory (ncLab) located at The University of Trento

Facebook and the Real World: Correlations between Online and Offline Conversations

English. Are there correlations between language usage in conversations on Face-book and face to face meetings? To an-swer this question, we collected transcrip-tions from face to face multi-party conver-sations between 11 participants, and re-trieved their Facebook threads. We au-tomatically annotated the psycholinguistic dimensions in the two domains by means of the LIWC dictionary, and we per-formed correlation analysis. Results show that some Facebook dimensions, such as “likes ” and shares, have a counterpart in face to face communication, in particular the number of questions and the length of statements. The corpus we collected has been anonymized and is available for re-search purposes. Italiano. Ci sono correlazioni tra l’uso del linguaggio nelle conversazioni su Face-book e faccia a faccia? Per rispondere a questa domanda, abbiamo raccolto delle trascrizioni di conversazioni di gruppo tra 11 partecipanti e campionato i loro dati Facebook. Abbiamo annotato automatica-mente le dimensioni psicolinguistiche per mezzo del dizionario LIWC e abbiamo es-tratto le correlazioni tra le due diverse tipologie testuali. I risultati mostrano che alcune dimensioni linguistiche di Face-book, come i “mi piace ” e il numero di condivisioni, correlano con dimensioni linguistiche dell’interazione faccia a fac-cia, come il numero di domande e la lunghezza delle frasi. Il corpus e ’ stato anonimizzato ed e ’ disponibile per scopi di ricerca.