Social influence and emotional state while shopping

Abstract

New technologies are opening novel ways to help people in their decision-making while shopping. From crowd-generated customer reviews to geo-based recommendations, the information to make the decision could come from different social circles with varied degrees of expertise and knowledge. Such differences affect how much influence the information has on the shopping decisions. In this work, we aim to identify how social influence when it is mediated by modern and ubiquitous communication (such as that provided by smartphones) can affect people’s shopping experience and especially their emotions while shopping. Our results showed that large amount of information affects emotional state in costumers, which can be measured in their physiological response. Based on our results, we conclude that integrating smartphone technologies with biometric sensors can create new models of customer experience based on the emotional effects of social influence while shopping.