Consumer Behavior in “Equilibrium”: How Experiencing Physical Balance Increases Compromise Choice

Abstract

The authors propose that the physical sensation of balance can affect consumer judgments and decisions. A series of six experiments demonstrates that certain consumer behaviors, such as leaning back in a chair while shopping online, can activate the concept of balance and thereby affect the consumer decision-making process. Specifically, consumers experiencing a heightened sense of balance are more likely to choose compromise options. The authors propose and show evidence for the mechanism underlying these effects: that the concept of balance is metaphorically linked in the mind to the concept of parity and that activating balance increases the accessibility of the parity concept. The increased accessibility of parity changes consumer perceptions of the product offerings in a choice set, increasing the selection of compromise options because they provide parity on the described product attributes.