Empirical study of the "what is beautiful is good" cognitive bias: A study on consumer purchasing decisions

For more than a decade, researchers of Neuromarketing in the field of decision-making neuroscience have been studying the limitations, cognitive biases, and stereotypes of consumers. The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive bias of "what is beautiful is good" on consumer’s purchasing decisions. The appearance of the product is one of the most important factors in the consumer's decision to purchase a product, however, functional information might lead to a breach of expectation in the purchase decision.In order to investigate this phenomenon, 40 female undergraduate students of Tabriz University were selected by convenience sampling method. In this study, 140 wearable gadgets in four categories of beautiful products and standard products, and congruent and incongruent functional information were presented, using eevoke software, in order to investigate the purchase decisions of the participants.Repeated measurement analysis shows that when congruent information is provided, participants have a faster response time to a purchase decision task. The interactive effect of product appearance and information was also significant.The results of this study show that information processing can be as effective as the appearance of the product. These results complement previous and recent findings on “what is beautiful is good” cognitive bias and suggest that functional information is important in interacting with product appearance in the purchasing decision process.