Shopping
Issue no. 52
Ah, Black Friday…the shopping holiday built on hype, FOMO, and theater. Here we examine the evolution and psychology of modern shopping…we got social identity, social capital, and synthetic trust.
The Mall as Social Capital
Murat Bayraktar revisits the fist enclosed mall, Southdale, built as a climate-proof community hub. Designed by Victor Gruen as a modern public square, it produced both bonding and bridging social capital. Now, mall closures echo national declines in civic engagement documented by Robert Putnam.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5343548
Why Black Friday Exists at All
Yihe Huang traces how a post-Thanksgiving retail push turned into a cultural event engineered around fear of missing out, social comparison, and bargain-driven decision cycles. Retail strategy meets consumer psychology.
https://doi.org/10.54097/4p07xf31
How Your Eyes Read Reviews
Tao Chen et al use eye-tracking to reveal that shoppers fixate on negative comments more than positive ones, especially women. Visual attention correlates with purchase decisions, and users can’t detect fake reviews. Attentional bias drives behavior more than content.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.865702
Fake Reviews Now Fool Everyone
Weiyao Meng et al show that humans aren’t good at detecting AI-generated fake reviews. LLMs perform just as badly. Systems relying on review “authenticity” without verification are open to mechanized fraud. Big skepticism bias toward positive reviews, big vulnerability to fake negative ones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13313
Happiness Comes From Intrinsic Goals
Olaya Moldes finds that spending boosts well-being when purchases satisfy intrinsic needs, not when they’re experiential or material. Intrinsic goal satisfaction explains way more variance than old spending categories. Materialistic people still reach for stuff to meet internal goals.
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12602