Behind Online Behavior

Psychological insights on the choices we make online.

Liraz Margalit Ph.D.

How Does a Kitchen Island Strengthen Family Bonds?

Neuroarchitecture is a field of research that examines how to design spaces and interfaces that affect the mental, physical, and emotional health of the people interacting with them.

Is Starbucks Successful Because of Its Coffee, or Something Else?

The new world is characterized by small to medium businesses that still offer discounts and promotions, while successful companies don't talk to their customers about money anymore.

This Is Your Brain on Sale

Online purchasing behavior is largely influenced by various marketing manipulations, or “dark patterns."

The Democratization of Trust

Trust drives the economy. Yet in the digital sharing economy, trust is currently limited to those with the technical know-how to enable it. Isn’t it time to democratize trust?

The Importance of Digital Experiences

In today’s tech-orientated landscape, the vast majority of customers' interactions take place online, so you need to ensure your customers have a positive digital experience.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Digital World

Human evolutionary developments didn't prepare us to cope with a digital environment that constantly challenges our natural tendencies.

Reach Your Customers Through the Subconscious

There are dozens of unconscious processes and cues directing customers' behavior.

Business Meets Emotion Through Memory

Tap your customer's emotions through the power of positive memories.

If You Want to Win Over Customers, Appeal to Their Emotions

Shopping data often looks at website visitors through hard numbers, but humans are more driven by irrationality.

Applying Conversational Analysis to the Digital World

Digital interactions with customers as they progress linearly from touchpoint to touchpoint is, in a very real sense, a conversation.

How to Create Addictive Experiences?

We need to steer away from abstract goals, such as thought leadership, and start thinking in terms of clearly defined actions.

How Emotions Shape Your Digital Experience

Memories of feelings provide the necessary information with minimal brain load.

Why We’re More Likely to Buy Frivolous Things on Our Mobile?

When it comes to what we’re buying it also seems that the device really does matter.

The Psychology of Experience in the Digital World

a single experience is made up of an infinite number of smaller experiences.

Who Moved My Virtual cheese ?

When you mess with mental models, you run a major risk of slowing down and annoying your customers, potentially losing them all together.

To Understand Big Data, Try Thinking Like a Psychologist

Rich data tells us plenty about what our customers do, but next to nothing about why they are doing it.

Sensory Marketing; The Smell of Cinnamon That Made Me Buy

While we like to think that we know why we make the decisions we make, we are in fact controlled by hidden biological forces more than we would like to admit.

Do We Control Our Own Purchasing Habits?

Flaws in our decision-making ability are fuel for the market. In certain situations we are especially susceptible to external influences.

The Psychological Roots of Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go scratches some basic psychological itches

The Psychology of Chatbots

Increased “humanization” of chatbots can trigger a crucial paradigm shift.

What Screen Time Can Really Do to Kids' Brains

Too much at the worst possible age may have negative consequences.

What People Really Think When They See Your Profile Picture

On each social platform, a profile picture carries a different meaning and attempts to convey a different message.

The Environmental Cues that Affect our Online Decisions

People are sensitive to their feelings of ease or difficulty, but unaware of what triggers these feelings.

Why We’re Addicted to Our Smartphones, But Not Our Tablets

As mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency.

The Effect of Unconscious Associations on Visitors’ Behavior

Our thoughts and behavior are not under our intentional control, but are instead widely influenced by environmental factors. These automatic processes have a fundamental implication to our behavior in general as to our online behavior.

The Role of Emotions in Our Purchase Decisions

Advertising is above all a way to groom the emotional state, to nudge consumers towards a buy.

Why Are the Candy Crushes of the World Dominating Our Lives?

What happens when an organic form of existence, after evolving for millions of years, meets the last word in planned and designed addictiveness? Darwin goes searching for the gas pedal in this evolutionary phenomenon of his.

Men Systemize. Women Empathize.

An important variable that we can use to differentiate between users is gender. Research has provided evidence that there are inherited differences between the cognitive style of men and women—in other words, the way men and women think, perceive, and remember information.

The Psychology of Web Browsing

Understanding the human need for control offers a powerful tool for enhancing customer experience. I recently helped one of the world’s largest and most influential news organizations analyze their website. They were trying to push video content by having it load automatically on their homepage.The extensive efforts to push the content created the opposite reaction..

Online Personality Disorders

In my work as a web psychologist, I’m exposed to many different types of user behavior and online decision-making processes. Although each person is different and has an individual style, I have identified six recurring patterns of behavior that I identify as specific “online personality types.” In this piece, I’ll discuss the six pattern types

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