How Consumer Impulsiveness Moderates Online Trustworthiness Evaluations: Neurophysiological Insights

With the emergence of new technologies, in particular the Internet, the opportunity for impulsive purchases have expanded enormously. In this research-in-progress, we report the current status of an fMRI-project in which we investigated differences between neural processes in the brains of impulsive and non-impulsive shoppers during the trustworthiness evaluation of online offers. Both our behavioral and fMRI data provide evidence that the impulsiveness of individuals can exert significant influence on the evaluation of online offers, and can potentially affect subsequent purchase behavior. We show that impulsive individuals evaluate trustworthy and untrustworthy offers differently than do non-impulsive individuals. With respect to brain activation, both experimental groups (i.e., impulsive, non-impulsive) exhibit similar neural activation tendencies, but differences exist in the magnitude of activation patterns in brain regions that are closely related to trust and decision making, such as the DLPFC, the insula cortex, and the caudate nucleus.