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3 Cognitive Biases That Affect Purchase Behaviour
How to use them and how to avoid them.
Up until around 20 years ago, we used to have a handful of media platforms to get informed, the main ones: TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. They were the gateways to information and anything happening around the world.
The Internet upended this by giving us not only access to real-time news and information but also allowing almost every person and business to have a profile and a word at an incredibly affordable cost. Even the little grocery store around the corner shows on Google maps with its opening hours and the occasional review. We now live in a world where we’re continuously challenged by information and choice overload: it’s easy to get distracted; it’s hard to keep people’s attention.
The digital era has been progressively taking up considerable space in our everyday life; our phones are quite literally with us 24/7. When people are always ‘online’, the word ‘offline’ doesn’t make much sense anymore, and so it’s worth looking at how our cognitive biases also reflect in this digital world. As a brief definition, a cognitive bias is an individual’s construction of reality which dictates our behaviour in the world; thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
I mentioned in my previous post that cognitive biases are one of the core mental processes that affect our decisions. A thorough understanding of them is a powerful tool in shaping our digital marketing strategies. As this list can be long and overwhelming, in this article, based on the Digital Psychology course at Conversion XL, I want to focus on three common biases that influence purchase behaviour and the perception of your website or product.
Narrative fallacy
“People invent stories to connect events and facts. We love stories, and we let our preference for a good story eclipse facts and intervene in our ability to make rational decisions.
We love stories because we evolved that way. That’s how we entertained ourselves when there were no media available, that’s how information travelled.
