Using the mind to sell online

Abstract

Two teams of researchers have reported results that might be used in e-commerce to persuade people to buy more goods from websites. A group at the MIT Media Lab, headed by Ted Selker, claim that by monitoring the way web surfers move the mouse while looking at a page, they can predict some of the surfers’ goals or intentions. For example, by having people go through the motions of buying a music CD online, they claim to be able to predict, from the way people ‘linger’ over certain parts of a web page, their subjects’ second choices. The application would be to construct web pages that monitor mouse movements – current browsers make this information available to web sites – and adapt the sites to create ‘a more personal experience’. Another project, by Clifford Nass and Kwan Min Lee (J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. Vol. 7), has shown that people attribute personality characteristics to computer-generated voices. When listening to a voice giving information about books on a website, Nass and Lee have found that if the broad personality type of the voice (‘introverted'or ‘extroverted’) matches that of the listener, people are more willing to buy the book. They add, ‘To maximize liking and trust, designers should set parameters, for example, number of words per minute or frequency range, that create a personality that is consistent with the user and the content being presented.’ Now, if only personality could be determined from mouse movements… MW