People, Places, and Things

The psychology of design: How to create an environment in which you will thrive.

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D.

Shopping 101

Not all shoppers have the same objectives.

Published on December 21, 2011 by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. in People, Places, and Things

The yearly holiday shopping madness is about to conclude. Stores are packed and the people in them are busily boosting the economy. But what are people really up to at the mall?

People in the same store at the same time may have different reasons for being there - even during the end-of-year shopping crush. Research has shown that some people may be shopping with a clear purpose - they are trying to accomplish some utilitarian goal, say finding some soft, warm socks. These people want the shops they visit to be designed to help them achieve their specific objectives. Others in the same aisles might be more hedonistic shoppers, they really are "just looking" and out for a good time - and they'd like the store they're in to provide it - wandering through pleasantly arranged merchandise really appeals to them. The same person can be a utilitarian shopper at some times and a hedonistic one at others - and the same store can be crowded with one or the other type of shoppers at different times of the day - which can really complicate the retail design process.

If you can remove yourself from the shopping fray, some of the most interesting differences in shopping behavior can be observed between men and women. We've all seen the stereotypical performances - men who move directly to and from the location of the item that they need to purchase and women drifting through the aisles looking for the right gift. Kruger and Byker have studied these actions and link them to traditional behaviors among hunter/gathers. Although their conclusions are related to shopping, you may find the lessons learned handy as you think more generally about how spaces get used.

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After surveying men and women, Kruger and Byker conclude that "We believe, and study findings support this belief, that modern shopping behaviors are an adaptation of our species' ancestral hunting and gathering skills. . . . .Women . . . . scored higher on skills and behaviors associated with gathering, even through the environment and the objects being gathered have changed with respect to our ancestral environment. . . . . Men scored higher on skills and behaviors associated with hunting. Thus even though the prey is now an expensive home theatre system, men are still applying the skills that were developed to obtain meat in a hunter-gatherer environment."

Gatherers need to be able to assess if a fruit or vegetable is ripe, which explains why women are more sensitive to variations in reds, pinks, and yellows than men, for example. Smells and textures also can indicate ripeness. There is a certain amount of browsing involved in gathering as patches of fruits and vegetables are visited to determine their ripeness. Tracking prey is important for hunting - new socks move around a lot less than a gazelle, however. Fresh killed meat is not something to dally around with, it starts to spoil quickly.

So, men and women are each, in their own ways, utilitarian shoppers - and both can, at least theoretically, be hedonistic shoppers, on a sunny June afternoon at the farmers' market.

Daniel Kruger and Dreyson Byker. 2009. "Evolved Foraging Psychology Underlies Sex Differences in Shopping Experiences and Behaviors." Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 315-327.