Carpets Have a Huge Say in Your Purchases

According to a new scientific study, it would appear that people shopping in stores that have the floors covered with comfortable carpets feel better during their shopping experience, but also tend to view the products they are checking out as being “less comforting.” Test respondents did not arrive at the same conclusion when they walked on hard tile-covered floors, such as the ones present in most supermarkets and stores. Details of the study appear in the latest issue of the scientific Journal of Consumer Research.

“We first conducted a study to show that carpeting flooring indeed evokes a greater sense of physical comfort than tiled flooring. Based on this finding, we addressed a more practical and intriguing question: would these bodily sensations elicited by the flooring transfer to people's assessments of products that they observe while shopping?” the authors write in the journal entry. The science group behind the investigation includes University of Minnesota scientist Joan Meyers Levy, and University of British Columbia researchers Rui Zhu and Lan Jiang, e! Science News reports.

In their investigation, the scientists made people either stand on hard tiles, such as the ones present in most stores, or on comfortable carpet coverings. The participants were then made to watch a number of products, located either close, or moderately far, and gave their judgment on the comfort level of the objects they saw in both instances. The scientists noticed that, when it came to very distant objects, bodily sensations no longer influenced the judgments that people made. “The bodily sensations elicited by the flooring are more likely to be used as a comparison standard, not an interpretive frame,” the authors add.

The last experiment in the new studies yielded an unexpected conclusion. When asked to make out the contents of a gift basket, most people were better able to do so from a distance than from near the basket itself. “Interestingly, the results reversed in this case. When viewed from a moderate distance, the gift basket was judged as more comforting when individuals stood on the hard tile floor rather than the carpeted floor. These results further supported our premise that it is the viewing clarity that ultimately determines the direction of the influence of flooring-induced bodily sensations,” the group concludes.