Advertisements for desserts – should they include bite marks?

Those in the business of marketing desserts might be interested in new research from Donya Shabgard at the University of Manitoba, US, who has investigated, possibly for the first time, the influence of an advertisement’s dessert portrayal on consumer perceptions of desirability. Specifically, should advertisements show desserts with a bite taken out of them or […]

Round numbers, sharp numbers, and their perceived credibility

If someone told you that a soap was “99.44% pure” would you be more likely to believe their claim than if they rounded the number to “99% pure”? A 2006 paper in the journal Advances in Consumer Research authored by professors Robert M. Schindler (Rutgers University-Camden) and Richard F. Yalch (University of Washington) entitled: ‘It […]

Assessing the Perceived Personalities of Rocks

Of these three rocks, which would you say is the most ‘confident’ ? How about the most ‘sincere’ or ‘intelligent’? Just such questions were asked in a recent study by Dr. Mark Avis (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr. Sarah Forbes (University of Birmingham, UK) and Dr. Shelagh Ferguson (University of Otago, New Zealand). Their study […]

An fMRI study of surrealistic advertising

  First, a quick look at (some of) the scientific works which have investigated how fMRI might help in the understanding of the human brain’s responses to Surrealism. [1] Matching reality in the arts: self-referential neural processing of naturalistic compared to surrealistic images. (Perception. 2012;41(5):569-76.)  (surrealistic pictures here) [2]The Neural Basis of Object-Context Relationships on […]

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