🧠 The Psychology of Price, Happiness and Positivity
Welcome to our latest newsletter.
In this email, we share a selection of positive psychological insights to brighten your holiday season 🎄.
We look at how happiness can get you lower prices. Also how prices themselves affect people's happiness.
At why you should use hyperbole, but only for positive messages.
And the impact of positive emotion in Google Ad keywords.
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❤️ Make your communications more persuasive.
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The financial benefits of being happy
More bad news for the misery guts. Good news for those full of festive cheer. Not only do happier people live longer (and are happier), but they might also be offered lower prices.
In this paper, across six field experiments, the researchers found that signals of happiness result in discounts. For example, when two researchers went into phone repair shops with a cracked Samsung and asked how much it’d be to get an upgrade, a “I’m a happy person” phone case reduced the price by about £21.
Across all the experiments, the discount for happy people was in the range of 5-9%
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Barokas, G., & Sherman, A. (2024). Does Consumer’s Happiness and Other Emotions Signaling Affect Seller’s Prices? Theory and Evidence From Six Field Studies. SAGE Open, 14(2), 21582440241241455.Photo by Imagen3
Money really can buy happiness
This just in.
Researchers created ads for fake brands, which were given either high or low prices; after being exposed to them, participants then completed a measure of happiness. Those who’d seen the expensive products were significantly less happy.
A follow-up study showed that exposure to high prices also made people less prosocial.
So why are shoppers in Primark so rude?
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Dahlen, M., Colliander, J., Gajic, V., Kim, O., & Thorbjørnsen, H. (2024). How do advertised prices affect consumers' financial well‐being and happiness?. Psychology & Marketing.
This article is 100% an absolutely must-read
It scraped over 22,000 product reviews on Amazon and measured the number of ‘helpful’ ratings each comment had received. Positive hyperbole increased review helpfulness, while negative hyperbole decreased it.
Whether this translates into persuasive comms like adverts remains to be seen, but it’s certainly worth testing (i.e., use positive hyperbole for yourself and avoid negative hyperbole for e.g., competitors or unfulfilled need states).
(P.S. I appreciate this post might not actually be a 100% must-read, apologies.)
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Pierce, K. M. (2024). The Effect of Hyperbole on the Perceived Helpfulness of Amazon Product Reviews.
Be positive
This lovely and delightful study showed the power of positive language.
The researchers found that positive emotion keywords increase the likelihood of clicking on paid search ads. Results from six studies supported this and showed that positive emotion reduced persuasion knowledge (i.e., made people less sceptical).
Interestingly, search results for queries with positive emotion keywords currently contain fewer ads, suggesting there’s a big opportunity here to exploit.
What are you waiting for!
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Whitley, S. C., Chakravarty, A., & Wang, P. (2024). EXPRESS: Positive Emotions During Search Engine Use: How You Feel Impacts What You Search for and Click On. Journal of Marketing, 00222429241263012.
As ever, if there's anything we can help with, do get in touch.
James, Patrick and Dan
We practically apply the science of the human mind for hard, commercial results
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