Emotion, decision-making, and consumer behavior in virtual reality

Immersive virtual reality (VR) is an excellent tool for probing the ebb and flow of our emotional states, which influence the decisions we make everyday. In our first project on the interplay between emotion and decision-making, we translated a well-known reward processing task to VR, with the aim of tracking people's psychophysiological measures in real-time. This allowed us to explore the associations between these biometric signals and how people reported feeling during the decision-making task. This method could allow us to one day infer people's internal states based solely off of their physiological signals like pupillary dilation, which could have widespread applications in domains such as marketing and advertising.

In another line of work, we created a virtual shopping environment to test how interactivity affects product valuation in VR. We designed a naturalistic retail environment, and asked people to shop as they normally would in the physical world. We are currently investigating whether manipulating the level of interactivity (i.e., being able to pick up and move items around, or just interacting with a 2D menu to make purchasing decisions) affects people's valuations of those items. We can measure these subjective evaluations using a range of self-reported measures such as psychological ownership, willingness-to-pay, and likelihood of purchase. This project could provide insight into how virtual retail environments should be designed, especially as companies invest in expanding their marketing and retail efforts into virtual contexts.

For more information

For more information, contact Tara Srirangarajan at tarasri@stanford.edu.