Christmas Purchases. Why You Can Save Money By Controlling the Posture of Your Arms
Mathias Streicher (University of Innsbruck) and Zachary Estes (Bocconi University) have found that the posture of your arms can affect how much or how little you buy. We typically think of shopping and consumption as actions toward ourselves, like bringing food into our mouths or moving products from a store shelf into a shopping cart. Moving food or a product toward yourself typically involves flexing or bending your arm at the elbow. And because flexed arms are usually associated with consumption, merely flexing your arms can increase your purchasing and consumption. Extending your arms out straight, like holding or moving things away from yourself, can instead decrease consumption. This effect of arm position even occurs when shopping online.
In some situations, however, we think of shopping as an action away from ourselves, like picking up a pack of gum or a chocolate and handing it to a cashier, or putting it on a belt that moves it away from you and toward the cashier. When shopping is conceptualized away from yourself like that, then the effect of arm posture reverses, so that extended arms increase purchasing and flexed arms decrease purchasing. So be careful how you position arms while shopping. Straight extended arms help control buying things toward yourself, and flexed arms limit buying things away from yourself.
The conclusions stem from a series of experiments Streicher and Estes described in Shopping to and fro: Ideomotor Compatibility of Arm Posture and Product Choice (forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Psychology).
In one experiment, people were asked to push a shopping cart with either flexed or extended arms towards a product display and then to indicate which products they wanted to purchase. The participants who pushed the cart with flexed arms hypothetically purchased more products than the participants who pushed the cart with extended arms.
A second experiment used similar methods, but in an online shopping scenario. This time participants browsed an online shop and indicated which products they wanted to purchase, while pressing one palm either upward on the underside of a table (flexed arm) or downward on the topside (extended arm). And again shoppers with a flexed arm hypothetically purchased more and spent more than shoppers with an extended arm.
In a third experiment participants indicated their purchase intentions by moving products into a purchasing area, while maintaining a flexion or extension arm posture with the other arm. In one case the purchasing area (marked by a shopping cart icon) was located beyond the products, so participants had to move the chosen products away from their bodies. In the other condition, the shopping cart icon was located between the products and the participants, so they moved the chosen products towards their bodies. The two conditions produced opposite effects: When purchasing toward oneself (e.g., moving a product from a shelf into a basket), flexed arms increased product choices. But when purchasing away from oneself (e.g., moving a product toward a cashier), then extended arms increased product choices.
This ideomotor compatibility effect occurs because when consumers think of purchasing products they mentally simulate by default motor movements towards the body. Hence, real body actions, which are compatible with these motor simulations, enhance the purchase behavior.