Audrin Catherine, Brosch Tobias, Sander David, Chanal Julien
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva Switzerland.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2018 Aug 24;12:172. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00172. eCollection 2018.
Visual attention is an important condition for consumer decision-making. However, not much is known on individuals' determinants of this visual attention. Using eye tracking, this study investigated how psychological values (i.e., materialism) modulate visual attention to specific sources of information (i.e., product, brand and additional information) in the context of luxury consumption. Participants were asked to perform a forced-choice experiment, where products were randomly assigned with luxury and non-luxury brands (Experiment 1) and product information (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 revealed that materialism was related to relatively higher attention to luxury as opposed to non-luxury and higher choice proportion of products displayed with a luxury brand. Experiment 2 showed that when providing additional product information (e.g., regarding the material) in addition to the brand, all participants chose luxury products more often. Interestingly, choices seemed to be driven by enhanced attention to brand for participants with high levels of materialism when choosing luxury products. In contrast, choices were driven by text for participants with low levels of materialism for non-luxury products. This suggests that individuals with high levels of materialism may prefer luxury products for different reasons than individuals with low levels of materialism: while the first focus on the symbolic dimension conveyed by the brand (Experiment 1), the latter pay attention to the actual product characteristics (Experiment 2). Taken together, our results suggest that materialism as a psychological value has an impact on visual attention and information selection during decision-making in the context of luxury consumption.
视觉注意力是消费者决策的重要条件。然而，对于个体视觉注意力的决定因素，我们所知甚少。本研究采用眼动追踪技术，探究了在奢侈品消费情境中，心理价值观（即物质主义）如何调节对特定信息源（即产品、品牌和附加信息）的视觉注意力。参与者被要求进行一项强制选择实验，实验中产品被随机赋予奢侈品牌和非奢侈品牌（实验1）以及产品信息（实验2）。实验1表明，与非奢侈品相比，物质主义与对奢侈品的相对更高关注度以及展示有奢侈品牌的产品的更高选择比例相关。实验2表明，当除品牌外还提供额外的产品信息（例如关于材质）时，所有参与者更常选择奢侈品。有趣的是，在选择奢侈品时，对于物质主义程度高的参与者，选择似乎是由对品牌的关注度提高所驱动。相比之下，对于非奢侈品，物质主义程度低的参与者的选择是由文本驱动的。这表明，物质主义程度高的个体选择奢侈品的原因可能与物质主义程度低的个体不同：前者关注品牌所传达的象征维度（实验1），而后者关注实际的产品特征（实验2）。综上所述，我们的研究结果表明，物质主义作为一种心理价值观，在奢侈品消费决策过程中对视觉注意力和信息选择有影响。
