By Deborah Balthazar | Illustrations by Gordon Studer
Applied Research Briefs
How Branding Affects Online Shopping Behavior
When consumers are bombarded with seemingly endless options online, what determines where shoppers will look first? Fashion merchandising researcher Shubha Bennur, PhD, led research that sheds light on this question.
In a study recently published in the Journal of Textile Science and Fashion Technology using novel eye-tracking software, Dr. Bennur looked at consumers’ decision-making process when shopping online for jeans. The study participants were 75 college students, who looked at mock product pages of branded and unbranded products.
As participants browsed, Dr. Bennur discovered that the eye tracker generated different hot spots and gaze plots on areas of interest that they focused on when they compared a branded vs. an unbranded product.
For the branded jeans, participants spent the most time looking at product pictures and focused on the different color choices for almost eight seconds before going on to read the product description. For unbranded jeans, participants spent about 13 seconds on average looking at product reviews and the description before looking at the photo of the jeans.
“I think that really helps them make their decision. They want to see the product features up close. They want to see the reviews to establish that trust,” says Dr. Bennur.
In the future, Dr. Bennur hopes to explore how consumer behavior is impacted by age, culture, artificial intelligence and shopping on social media.
Exploring Our Complex Connections with Siblings
By Deborah Balthazar and Merrill Meadow | Illustrations by Gordon Studer
Research has shown that many people spend more time with their siblings than with anyone else. That means siblings can have as much impact on a person's perspective and behavior as parents do.
Psychology researcher Hamide Gozu, PhD, has studied how parenting styles and varying cultures can each shape sibling interactions. Currently, working toward the goal of strengthening family bonds and reducing conflicts, she’s investigating how specific personality traits shape individuals’ responses to differing patterns of experience in family interactions. Dr. Gozu is pursuing two research projects designed to assess the myriad factors at work.
The first, done in collaboration with Jenna Rieder, PhD, examines how a person’s sense of well-being is shaped by different patterns of parents’ treatment of each sibling. The researchers hypothesize that differences in parents’ financial or emotional support for each child — combined with how siblings interact in response to those differences — can have distinctly different effects on the siblings as adults.
The second study explores how a child’s exposure to aggressive family environments — such as parental aggression or sibling bullying — may contribute to that person engaging in intimate partner aggression as an adult. Dr. Gozu hypothesizes that such experiences may prompt a “moral disengagement” that desensitizes individuals to harmful behaviors in later relationships. “If that is the case, we may be able to design therapies that help people overcome those effects.”