Rachel Feltman: It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: it’s already been “Black Friday” for, like, a week. What used to be a post-turkey American shopping tradition has ballooned into a global phenomenon of November sales. If you’re feeling the urge to do some serious damage to your bank account this week, you’re definitely not alone—and you shouldn’t blame yourself; these sales are designed and marketed to send you into a shopping spiral.
For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. My guest today is Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, professor of consumer psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. She’s here to tell us all about the psychology behind Black Friday shopping and what we can do to protect ourselves and our wallets.
Thank you so much for joining us to chat today.
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Cathrine Jansson-Boyd: Thank you for having me.
Feltman: So your expertise is in consumer psychology. Could you tell us a little bit about what kinds of questions you try to answer in your research?
Jansson-Boyd: So I’ve been really lucky, in terms of my research career, that I have been able to look at very many different approaches to consumer behaviors. And generally what I’m interested in is trying to tap into aspects of human behavior that really hasn’t been addressed before. And this encompasses tactile input, for an example—which, when I started my career a long time ago, we knew very little about—so how you can use touch to change people’s perception. So I have done quite a lot on that.
I have also looked at how to reduce energy consumption. That’s something that tends to be notoriously difficult to do because people often are not conscious of how they’re using energy. So that presents quite a lot of challenge.
And along very similar lines I’ve also been involved in trying to reduce food waste within people’s homes—again, often something that happens subconsciously; people don’t even know that they’re throwing away food. So I’ve looked at quite a lot of environmentally linked aspects of consumption, but I’ve also looked at more kind of pure commercialized elements such as: How do we make a tea box more appealing? What is it that’s gonna…
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