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Influences of background music on consumer behavior have economic potential for businesses. However, the precise parameters for manipulating these effects have remained elusive. In this study, the impact of different genres of background music on consumer spending was examined in three branches each of both a Japanese-themed and a Mexican-themed restaurant chain in Singapore. Three music genre conditions (“pop,” “traditional,” “mix”) corresponding to the restaurants’ cultural theme, were played for a week in each restaurant. Data on total spending and spending per customer were collected and analyzed. While direct music genre effects were not statistically significant, results indicated certain trends where higher consumer expenditure was observed in conditions utilizing a mixture of pop and traditional music (“mix”). Specifically, spending per customer for the “mix” condition was 11.4% higher than for “pop” for the Japanese restaurant, whereas it was 6.3% higher for the “mix” condition than for “traditional” for the Mexican restaurant. The results suggest that music could be tailored to different days of the week to appeal to different customer profiles and that music can be parameterized to influence consumer behaviors.

With roots beyond behavioural economics to psychology, nudges can be applied for influencing healthy behaviours such as food choice and portions to decrease obesity for better public health outcomes. However, the effectiveness of the type of nudges are contentious with conflicting literature. In this pilot study, we conducted a 23-day study surveying the food choices that included portion, locus of control, demographic data, and psychological measures of personality, perceived stress, narcissism, regulatory focus, food choice motive and dietary restraint, with the participants given four intervention conditions of 12 instant messaging sent every two days through WhatsApp. The messages were either factual (control), focused on consequences, through social comparison, or persuasive. Running over the COVID19 pandemic, 17 participants completed the full surveys showing significant effects between the experimental conditions with the psychological parameters except for diet confidence and extraversion and conscientiousness, as well as cognitive restraint. We found BMI and waistline measurements to be suitable measurements, with promising results from the fear and social comparison nudges for food-related behaviours and exercise. Our pilot findings have implications to the use of nudges upon which future studies investigating psychological factors can build on.

For many decisions we make, we are more likely to receive feedback about some outcomes than about others, and thus we must operate under conditions of asymmetric partial feedback. In this paper, we examine the effects of asymmetric partial feedback on decision making across three experiments. Experiment 1 examines the effects of four partial feedback schedules on decision making in a single-attribute auditory detection task. Experiment 2 examines these same schedules in the context of a simulated experiment in which virtual participants perform a multi-attribute choice task. Experiment 3 then examines effects of one partial feedback schedule representative of a real-world decision-making domain (personnel selection) using an ecologically informed multi-attribute choice task. All three experiments reveal that asymmetric partial feedback primarily impacts on response-bias, a parameter of signal detection theory. These findings can be explained in terms of decision makers' attempts to maximize accuracy and the fact that shifts in response-bias will, under partial feedback, produce misleading impressions of greater accuracy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Empirical studies involving the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have often revealed a general implicit preference for European-American as opposed to African-American stimuli. While it has been pointed out that this does not establish the existence of an implicit negative attitude toward the less preferred target concept, the existence (or absence) of such attitudes is empirically difficult to ascertain. We describe a computational model of performance on the Race-IAT through which the influence of attitudinal positivity or negativity on expected IAT performance is explored using simulations in which the strengths and nature of target-attribute associations in memory are manipulated. Results indicate that IAT effects readily emerge from different patterns of implicit associations without any need for absolutely positive or absolutely negative implicit attitudes. Pitting a simulation of the standard IAT against a simulated Sorting Paired Features Task demonstrates an advantage for the latter in distinguish...