Virtually real
To wrap up the year, today I have a few short pieces on new research findings related to themes we’ve talked about before. We’ll cover clutter and well-being, hands in product shots, and how important realism is for virtual reality.
Piled up
Holiday sales were up over the pandemic. Way up. Holiday sales were up 8.3% in 2020 over 2019 and likely breaking records this year. Unable to travel or celebrate the holidays together in person, gifts might be the substitute we’ve used to show we care.
And let’s not even get started with toys. Toy sales were up 16% in 2020 over 2019. This year was already tracking ahead of last year, even before the demand for toys became ‘unbelievable’ since the start of the holiday season.
First come gifts. Then comes… clutter.
On December 25, Santa Claus took a well-deserved nap while the reindeers kicked back with their leafy greens and mushrooms.
By December 26, the calls to professional organizers were starting to pour in. As one explained in a prior year, “We get a lot of calls on December 26. Our repeat clients know it’s going to be a disaster. The people who’ve never worked with us before will reach out the week after the holidays.
We’re headed for a new year. We want to get fit, save money, and finally get organized.
We’ve talked about clutter before in the context of open plan homes. It turns out that walls are good for keeping things neat and keeping the toy chaos at bay. Still, I doubt that many new year’s resolutions involve putting up walls.
But decluttering can be good. The new year’s zeal for getting our homes in order might have positive psychological implications.
A recent study explored the relationship between clutter and well-being. Long story short: there is one.
In this study, 1111 participants filled out an online survey about their experiences. As an important caveat, most (90.6%) were women.
Everyone completed two measures of home clutter: an objective measure and a subjective measure.
In the objective measure, people classified the level of clutter in three spaces in their homes by selecting a matching image. In case the high clutter pictures strike you as troubling, they are. This scale has previously been used to identify hoarding behavior (scores of 4 or higher indicate the need for clinical attention).
Image source. Rating the degree of objective clutter in different rooms at home.
In the subjective measure of clutter, people rated their agreement with items like “The clutter in my home upsets me,” and “I avoid having people come to my home because of the clutter.” This measure gets at the effect of clutter on ourselves and our lives.
People also rated how much home felt like home – a concept known as “psychological home”. The items included ones like “I put a lot of time and effort into making a place my own,” and “I surround myself with things that highlight my personality.” (If you’re interested in the link between our homes and our personality, there’s more on that here.)
All these variables were used to predict people’s well-being, which was measured using the PERMA model – the degree to which we experience positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.
Subjective clutter and psychological home reliably predicted all these measures of well-being. Yep. Having clutter-free homes that reflect who we are is good.
Interestingly, though, objective clutter wasn’t very predictive of well-being. And people could experience subjective clutter without objective clutter. Nearly half (47.3%) of those who scored in the “normal” range of objective clutter (i.e., giving themselves a rating of 3 or less) still experienced subjective clutter.
We can add clutter to the many other environmental factors where our subjective experience is much more predictive of outcomes than objective measures.
Having clutter subjectively under control most strongly predicted two aspects of well-being: positive emotion and accomplishment. So, if you want to declutter this year, or encourage someone else to, the carrots might be feeling better and like you’re able to get more things done.
Reaching in
Of course, one thing that got us into the post-holiday mess is shopping.
Last time, we talked about how touching items, even if only through a touchscreen, can increase our perceived ownership of them and our willingness to pay for them.
We’ve also talked about how action in images, like products that look grabbable, can be appealing and increase people’s purchase intentions.
Now, a new study brings those two research lines together and helps explain a recent product shot trend: people reaching into shots to hold an item. This type of shot might be getting us into some shopping trouble.
The study tested whether vicarious touch – seeing a hand touch a product – increases our engagement, evaluation, and willingness to pay for the pictured product.
In one field study, the researchers collected all the Instagram posts from four brands that make touchable products – Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Samsung, and We Are Knitters. They whittled down the collection to only those posts that included a product shot – 4535 posts in total.
Next, they coded quite a few variables for each post. Did it contain hands? Arms? What was the probable gender of the person whose hand or arm was pictured? Did the photo have a self or other perspective? Did it include a hand touching the product?
They dumped all these variables into a stats model, as you do, and used them to predict the number of likes that each post garnered.
A key contrast was between posts that had no hands at all, ones that had a hand in the shot but the hand was not touching the key product, and ones with vicarious touch, where the hand was touching the product.
Image source. The key contrast between brand Instagram posts that didn’t include a hand, ones that included a hand that wasn’t touching the product, and ones that included vicarious touch.
Touch was good! Instagram posts that included vicarious touch garnered better engagement – AKA more likes – than posts without a hand or with a hand not touching the product.
Image source. Posts with product touching garnered more likes.
You could see how this whole product touch thing might lead to an arms race between marketers.
If you’re a marketer trying to optimize Instagram posts for engagement, and you look at the numbers, you might notice that posts with people touching stuff do better. So why not make those kinds of posts more often?
Samsung is (was?) in this camp. Their Instagram posts contained hands 89% of the time. And of those, 84% included touching.
The other three brands from this study were less extreme, but there were some interesting differences. For example, Starbucks had way more touching in posts (touching in 50% of posts with hands) than Caribou Coffee (touching in 36% of posts with hands). Were the Starbucks people following the numbers more closely?
Another experiment tested the effects of vicarious touch in virtual reality (VR). Or, as some call it, the next great shopping frontier.
Image source. A VR retail experience. Red t shirts for all.
In this experiment, 130 people experienced a VR sportswear store. After looking around to get acquainted, they were placed into different conditions. In one, the vicarious touch condition, they saw a hand reach out from their (hypothetical) body and touch a red t shirt. In another, the no touch condition, they saw a hand reach out and grab a shelf pole instead. Afterward, everyone saw some additional information about the t shirt and its color choices.
After the VR experience, people evaluated the t shirt and reported how much they’d be willing to pay for it.
Vicarious touch in VR had an effect. People who saw a hand reach out and grab the t shirt evaluated the shirt more positively and reported being willing to pay more for it. To the tune of 32% ($9.75 for those who had seen the hand touch the t shirt vs. $7.36 for those who had seen the hand touch the pole).
I’d imagine the effects would be even stronger if people were able to “touch” items in the VR retail environment by controlling the movement of their virtual hands. That’s a question for future research on the next great shopping frontier to explore.
Now let’s turn to another new frontier for VR: relaxation.
Virtually real
We’ve talked about how nature, both real and virtual, can help us feel good. And we’ve also delved into how experiencing nature scenes in VR can help people restore and relax during work breaks.
Does it matter how realistic virtual scenes are for restoration? Are low-fi scenes good enough to get us relaxing, or do we need more realism?
Image source. Relaxing lo fi palm trees. But are they enough?
A new study tested how important realism is for restorative effects of VR. In the study, 120 people completed a task to induce stress. For ten minutes, they wrote in detail about a recent stressful experience.
If for whatever reason you want to stress yourself out, here’s the prompt:
Please try to remember the last time you felt very stressed or in a negative mood. You may have felt anxious, irritable, fatigued, or overwhelmed.
To minimize variability in the stressful events people recalled, they were asked to write about commonplace stressors rather than traumatic events.
Before and after the writing task, people reported their mood using a validated scale. The scale included measures of positive feelings, negative feelings, and a more specific measure of serenity. Serenity (serenity now!) is a state characterized by positive feelings and relatively low energy. A state of positive relaxation if you will. It has previously been linked to restorative environments.
In case you felt small zaps reading the stress prompt above, you’re in good company. The stress task worked. People felt less positive, less serene, and more negative after recalling and writing about a recent stressful episode.
After the stress task, people explored one of four different VR experiences. The goal was to test to what extent each one helped them restore from stress – to feel more positive, more serene, or less negative than they did immediately after the writing prompt.
The four VR experiences differed in two ways. First, the scene represented either the natural or the built environment. Second, the scenes were high or low in realism. More realistic scenes were ones that had more complexity and detail (e.g., more detailed foliage on the ground).
Image source. Four types of VR scenes represented the natural or built environment and were more or less realistic.
People were allowed to explore their VR environment within the confines of a safe lab area.
After the exploration, they then completed the same mood measures as earlier. They also reflected on their experience—what they liked and didn’t like.
More realistic VR environments, especially those that represented nature, were more restorative after stress.
For one, realistic environments helped bring back people’s positive feelings. There was a bigger gain in positive feelings for those people who experienced more realistic VR environments than those who experienced the less realistic environments.
Environment type, along with realism, also made a difference for serenity. People gained more serenity after a VR experience that represented a natural environment (vs. built environment) and was high in realism (vs. low in realism).
Image source, annotations added. Three-way interactions don’t have to be scary. Highly realistic VR experiences representing the natural environment increased people’s serenity more than any other type of VR experience.
In their reflections, people highlighted how important realism was for the quality of their experience. As one explained, one positive was “the realism of the trees and the sounds that made it feel like I was really there.”
They also felt as if virtual reality helped them momentarily escape real reality and its stresses. One said: “I liked how it allowed me to escape from any real-world stresses and free my mind.” Another agreed: “It was amazing, so cool to just escape reality, and not think about anything, your worries, the work you have to do. It was like another world. Just escape into the unknown.”
A short trip away with a return bonus of renewed positive mood and feelings of serenity.