"Consumers as Naive Physicists: How Visual Entropy Cues Shift Temporal Focus and Influence Product Evaluations"

Güneş Biliciler will be giving a research seminar in our department seminar series. She is currently a PhD candidate in Marketing at McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. She has an MSc in Social Psychology and BSc in Business Administration from Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include topics such as Entropy, Time Perception, Visual Perception, Minimalism, Product Disposal.

Abstract:

Marketers often use images to promote their products. For example, an advertisement for kitchen tools might display the tools alongside various ingredients; likewise, an advertisement for a bookstore might showcase pictures of the store's interior. One underlying visual characteristic of such images is the degree of "entropy"—or disorder—in their content. Using a fundamental principle from physics—namely, that entropy can only increase over time—as our starting point, we report results from three pilot studies and eleven experiments that investigate how entropy influences consumers' judgments and decisions. Specifically, we find that while high-entropy images shift consumers' temporal focus to the past, low-entropy images shift their temporal focus to the future. We further find that entropy-induced shifts in temporal focus influence consumers' decisions. Specifically, consistent with the notion of "fit fluency," we find that consumers evaluate past-related (e.g., vintage) products more favorably when they are accompanied by high-entropy images, and future-related (e.g., futuristic) products more favorably when they are accompanied by low-entropy images. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.Keywords: disorder, entropy, visual cues, temporal focus, product evaluation, time perception.