Are consumers cognitive misers? An event-related potential study on decision-making in online purchasing.

Abstract

The notion of cognitive miserliness that people can automatically perceive and sensitively react to cognitive cost in cognitive task completion has been accepted widely. No research has investigated the underlying neural processes associated with consumers' cognitive miserliness. We developed a paradigm for event-related potential (ERP) using online purchase decision-making tasks with high/low cognitive demand to explore consumers' neural responses to different levels of cognitive cost. Participants faced either deliberative (Deliberative) or heuristic decision-making (Heuristic_DM) in each trial. Four ERP components explain consumers' neural responses to cognitive cost. First, Deliberative_DM evoked larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) than Heuristic_DM. FRN can be evoked by anticipated negative outcomes. The larger FRN might mainly reflect the participants' loss perception led by anticipated high cognitive effort in Deliberative_DM. This finding might also imply that consumers encode cognitive effort as a cognitive cost with negative utility. Second, a larger P2 was evoked in Heuristic_DM than in Deliberative_DM, suggesting that more attentional resources were allocated to the stimuli leading to Heuristic_DM demanding less cognitive expenditure. Third, P3b was observed in Heur-istic_DM, while slow-wave (SW) was observed in Deliberative_DM. Observed P3b, related to target stimulus classification, revealed that Heuristic_DM with low cognitive cost might be categorized as expected target stimuli. The SW, an ERP indicator of mental calculation, demonstrated that Deliberative_DM launched an effortful mental arithmetic process. Our insights will help marketing professionals better understand consumers' responses to the cognitive cost of information processing in purchase decision-making.

How do expert reviews and consumer reviews affect purchasing decisions? An event-related potential study.

“…Considering previous studies about purchase intentions mainly involved some endogenous components such as P2, N2, and later positive potential (LPP; Y. Chen & Yang, 2021; Shang et al, 2020; Zubair et al, 2020), this research identified P2, N2, and LPP as three ERP components.…”

“…Considering previous studies about purchase intentions mainly involved some endogenous components such as P2, N2, and later positive potential (LPP; Y. Chen & Yang, 2021;Shang et al, 2020;Zubair et al, 2020), this research identified P2, N2, and LPP as three ERP components. As one of the main potentials, P2 is a relatively early positive component with a peak latency range from 140-250 ms after the stimulus presentation (Delplanque et al, 2004).…”

“…The scope of existing consumer cognitive research in marketing focuses on price promotion, reviewers' self-disclosure, review volumes, utilitarian or hedonic, cognitive demand, and brand attitude (Y. Chen & Yang, 2021;F. Guo & Zhang, 2020;J.…”

Beyond humans: Consumer reluctance to adopt zoonotic artificial intelligence

“…This increased cognitive demand, in turn, leads to consumers leaning towards opting for human services instead. In other words, selecting a zoonotic AI triggers deliberative decision‐making, which requires consumers to invest cognitive resources and is thus perceived as a cognitive cost by consumers (Chen & Yang, 2021) due to the AI's unconventional embodiment. In summary, we contend that such deliberative decision‐making scenarios involving zoonotic AI compel consumers to exert cognitive effort, resulting in a reluctance to adopt such zoonotic AI.…”