The effect of risk attitude and information seeking tendency on product choices in the real world

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25280049
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Cognitive science
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: UEDA Kazuhiro 東京大学, 総合文化研究科, 教授 (60262101)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): SAMEJIMA Kazuyuki 玉川大学, 脳科学研究所, 教授 (30395131)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 認知科学 / 脳・神経 / 意思決定 / 消費行動

Outline of Final Research Achievements

As new products go on the market one after another, choice between known goods and unknown goods is one of the key factors of consumer behavior. But its underlying cognitive mechanism have not been clarified. In order to reveal it, repetitive choices among known goods and unknown goods are performed by utilizing mineral water bottles as stimuli. Further, brain activity during product choice was measured with fMRI. As a result, participants who tend to seek for information have a stronger tendency to choose unknown goods and their right frontal pole was activated when unknown goods were chosen. In addition, we conducted a similar experiment for persons whose history of buying beers were recorded. As a result, we found correlations between tendency for information seeking and the change of goods purchased between the first and the second halves. These results indicate that choosing unknown goods means gaining new information not only in a laboratory setting but also in the real world.

Free Research Field

認知科学