Secret Sauce to Avoid Heedless Shopping

Human behaviour is predominantly driven by #biases, heuristics, or mental shortcuts that reduce our effort to channel energy while making quick #decisions and enabling certain behaviours.

We often question — what causes us to purchase items ‘impulsively’ rather than rationally. Several factors contribute to the same, including situational elements, product features, cultural influences and personal preferences. However, the answer to this is also found by understanding the involvement of cognitive biases in purchase decisions.

Some prominent biases that influence this involve the affect heuristic, where we rely more on current emotions to make quick decisions, and hyperbolic discounting, where we value immediate rewards over long-term goals.

Here are two ways to avoid impulse buying:

1. Deferring Incentives: Often, purchasing items impulsively bolsters emotional states, leading to upliftment in impulse buying or unwarranted consumptions (Tendai & Crispen, 2009). Therefore, delaying the buying behaviour by making yourself create a desire to ‘earn’ the product later in time creates a possibility of postponing and removing the desire to purchase a product.

2. Seeking Accountability: Taking along a friend or a family member on a shopping excursion can help induce accountability and tamper with our tendencies to buy items impulsively and make informed decisions while making purchases that stick to the plan.

Using behavioural science, organisations promote #nudges to influence consumer decision-making involving social proofing, defaulting, framing or initiating subliminal visual cues to influence buying behaviour. In the same way, to enable conscious buying behaviour, self-nudges can be utilised to counter these solid urges and avoid post-purchase dissatisfaction.