Comments on: What We Don’t Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV and Judging People

By: Jeremy (PsyBlog author)

Jeremy (PsyBlog author) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:48:00 +0000

AJ, yup, sounds plausible...

By: Confederate

Confederate — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:52:00 +0000

there is actually literature (although very scanty) on picture preferences being affected by the laterality (right or left) of the subject in the picture.

given a picture with the main subject to the left of center and the same picture flipped horizontally so that the subject is to the right of center, majority of right handed people will select the right-of-center picture while this trend is not true (but not clearly opposite) for the case of left handed people.

Possible culprits might be lateralization of the brain although there are precious few studies on this specific topic

By: Jeremy (PsyBlog author)

Jeremy (PsyBlog author) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:15:00 +0000

Thanks for your comments on this one. It's certainly very interesting why people choose the right-most stockings. After asking around a friend (Erica) provided an explanation I like:

"The task is to compare the stockings, see how they differ, and select the best one. I think that people are always capable of finding/fabricating differences when asked! So that's one point. Then the second point is that some research says people make many many binary comparisons and not one-overall meta-judgement. Then, when people were viewing the hosiery the rightmost stocking was always the "most recently viewed". So those two points coupled together with a bit of statistical logic says that Stocking D would be most likely to be chosen. Stocking D always ends up in the final comparison, whereas the other three stockings have less of a chance of ending up in that final comparison."

Thanks Erica - I'm convinced!

By: Neo

Neo — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:30:00 +0000

I remember reading somewhere that people notice teh right aisles more than the aisles on the left hand side...is it possible that this has something to do with right-handednes v.s left handedness?...wondering...

By: Dutchy

Dutchy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:59:00 +0000

Here's a possible explanation for the 'shopping for stockings'-phenomenon:

We write from the left to the right and our time-lines go to the right as well. That means more to the right is newer. And newer products are more attractive.

I'd like to know if the results for shopping for stockings would be different when an Arabic test group were used as Arabic language is written from right to left.

By: Hannah

Hannah — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:32:00 +0000

I'm most intrigued by the first study. Shopping. I honestly do not understand how the right pair would be preferred. I don't know which pair I would prefer. And if I chose the right pair would I know why?

By: nico

nico — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:13:00 +0000

When I read about some of these studies, I feel that I would act as ignorant or naive like the test subjects. But with other studies I am completely sure that I would know better, because I've been in real life situations similar to the study setup and I reacted differently.

I understand that these studies are statistical in nature. If you can show that a significant amount of people show the not so rational behaviour, then it means success to demonstrate the premises.

I'm curious about what happens with the people that did act rationally and wasn't "tricked". Are there persons that are inmune to psycological studies? Is there any psycological study that tries to identify why?

I can't help thinking that some of the results are not really so important. A lot of important decisions are taken in the context of organizations that have devices to cancel individual weaknesses.