Supermarket shopping plays a large part in every person’s life, with some people going in almost every day to pick up items and products. As a result of this, the concept of supermarket shopping is a staple in people’s lives. Therefore, how people perceive and acknowledge these shops is an important factor in how they are laid out and how supermarkets choose to promote their products, from own brand to higher value items, with research being carried out of the different elements involved in a person’s shop, such as the path that they may take around the shop (Larson et al., 2005).

This essay focuses on a person going into a supermarket to do a shop with no shopping list and how they psychologically process the supermarket, focussing on topics of cognitive, perception and biological nature. For perception, this essay focusses on visual processing and how people process and divert attention within their visual field, focussing on the Gestalt principles and how items can be made to appear to ‘pop-out’ on the supermarket shelves. Cognitive styles play a part how a person decides how to approach a supermarket, as their way of thinking affects which products they choose to buy. Finally, the effect of dopamine during browsing and purchasing, and how that can sometimes lead to some people being more inclined to impulse purchases. The aim of this essay is to highlight the importance of psychobiology, cognition and perception on supermarkets and how they should be arranged to optimise purchasing from the consumer.

A person’s perception of a supermarket is an important part of retail management due to the want for people to come back to shop there again (Orth et al., 2016). A factor that influences how a shopper experiences the supermarket is how they perceive it and where their vision and attention is drawn to. Visual perception is done using several parts of the brain, importantly the Visual Cortex, which processes the basic visual features that are being seen such as shape and colour (Pennartz et al., 2023). The Parietal Lobe also plays a large part, focussing on spatial orientation and attention direction (Tuite & Konczak, 2010). Human saccades are how the eye moves over the stimuli and how the eye will focus on relevant parts as and when it is required (Foulsham, 2015). These factors in perceptionalongside attention play an important role in the products that the shopper decides on purchasing.

When processing visual fields, there are certain ways to make a product ‘pop-out’, using queues such as colour and contrasting the Gestalt Grouping Principals of visual perception. These principals involve mental grouping by common denominators such as similarity and proximity. (Peterson & Berryhill, 2013). This Gestalt principle can be demonstrated in parallel search tasks, where a participant has to find the different coloured dot or the object that does not belong in the image.(Theeuwes, 1996). When a shopper enters the supermarket to locate the items that they need to purchase, if a product on the shelf is in a differential colour than the others, or if is a product that has been previously bought by the shopper, they are more likely to be able to identify the product, thus making them more inclined to buy it (Teufel et al., 2018). However, it is rare for products in supermarkets to have such extremely different packaging, making it harder for products to stand out against competitors.  

A common issue for shoppers is the reorganisation of supermarket shelves, as they become accustomed to the current lay out and remember where their preferred items are. Despite common sense predicting that the rearrangement of these items would slow down search task response time, a study into this found that response times stayed relatively the same despite the stimuli being shuffled. (Horowitz & Wolfe, 1998). However, this research was done into just the reshuffling of letters on a screen, which is considerably smaller than a supermarket shelf, and the letters are easier to discard than the brightly coloured competitors on the shelves.  In conclusion, visual perception plays a large role in the shopper’s experience, especially in how they decide which products they chose to buy and which to ignore. As a result, suppliers have adapted as such, and items are intentionally packaged in ways to draw the consumer’s eye using the Gestalt principles and “pop-out” techniques. However, a drawback of this is that often, people are more inclined to buy a product that they recognise and have bought before. This can be countered by some brands taking influence from others colour schemes to entice shoppers to give their brands a try.

Cognitive styles play a role in a shopper’s typical habits.  Cognitive styles were introduced in a study by Allport, where he defined them as a person’s personal and usual way of problem solving and understanding the world around them. (Allport, 1937). This has been since further developed and enhanced, leading to there now being more than 70 models and measures for cognitive styles and processing. As cognitive styles influence the way a person interacts and processes the supermarket, they are vital in understanding a person’s shopping habits. One cognitive style is analytic vs. holistic thinking, which entails two different thinking styles. Analytic thinkers are more prone to focusing on details and thinking more logically, thinking step-by-step when problem-solving, while holistic thinkers make more intuitive judgements and process information in a less rigid way (Atasoy & Konyalıhatipoğlu, 2019). Applying this to the case study of the shopper, the role of the shopper’s cognitive style will play an important role in how they proceed around the shop and decide what to buy as they are without a list. Examples of what this will affect is how they decide what to purchase. An person with a analytical cognitive type will examine the product, deliberating between options by looking at their price and ingredients before buying, whereas a person with a holistic cognitive style will decide what to buy based on what feels right.

Another example of cognitive styles would be reflective vs. impulsive, with people with a reflective cognition style being more prone to pause and think things through, while people with the impulsive cognition style act more impulsively and are more inclined to making rash decisions (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997). This will also affect how a shopper perceives the supermarket, as people who are more reflective will be more deliberate with their purchasing, while people with a more impulsive cognitive style will be quicker to choose their items and more inclined to purchasing items that they do not necessarily need. This cognition style has been seen by supermarket owners, as they often place the smaller items, such as sweets and small products people are likely to buy, near the tills so that these people more inclined to impulsivity will pick them up without thinking and purchase them on a whim.

Cognitive styles have been largely criticised due to how many of them there are as there is a lack of cohesion between the separate theories.(Bendall et al., 2016). These concerns are an issue for future research and practice in the field, as the ideas need consolidating and specificizing before future development so that they can be useful and predictive in future research, such as in shops in the future to help focus in on organising the shop in a certain way to benefit the key cognitive styles.

Another factor involved in what a shopper decides to buy when shopping without a list is the combination of motivation and reward. These are affected by dopamine. Dopamine is neurotransmitter stored in the synaptic vesicles which is believed to be released to create the feeling of reward, which has been demonstrated through studying the amount of dopamine released when presented with stimuli seen as rewards. (Young et al., 2005). The dopamine hypothesis and the dopamine theory of addiction also demonstrate this as it is the understanding that some addictive drugs also drive the release of dopamine. (Nutt et al., 2015). The role of dopamine has been investigated in a rodent study, that looked into the link between dopamine, reward pathways and addiction. The study put electrodes into the reward areas of the rat’s brain, which was stimulated every time the rats pressed down on a lever that was in their cage. The rats pressed the levels around once every second due to the feeling of stimulation that their reward sections received, even neglecting food while hungry to keep pressing the lever (Olds & Milner, 1954). While previously onlycredited with explaining drug addictions, the dopamine hypothesis can also be used when explaining shopping behaviours, especially more impulsive purchases. A study into this and whether shopping could be labelled as an addictive behaviour found that shopping can share physiological and behavioural characteristics of addiction, especially compulsive shopping (Hartston, 2012). This is caused by the hyperstimulation that occurs during shopping and the dopamine hit that occurs when impulsively shopping. The study was conducted in 2012, so further research into how modern shopping affects people and their reward and motivation system could highlight if supermarkets are laid out in a way to prompt impulsive choices and to encourage shoppers to make quick, snap judgements on what to purchase.

However, it may not just be the dopamine that leads to these shopping behaviours. Levels of stress while shopping (for example if the shopper is in a rush or if the shopper is distressed due to the fact that they don’t have a list), can lead to cortisol being released, which will also have an effect of the shoppers behaviours while in the shop as shopping can be used as a diversion for stress release (Hama, 2001).

Dopamine agonist drugs are associated with specific impulse control disorders. Dopamine agonists mimic the effects of dopamine by activating the dopamine receptors in the brain, resulting in an imitation of the feeling of dopamine and what it does to the brain (Choi & Horner, 2019). This can then be related back to the shopper, as more impulsive behaviours are likely to occur to get the same dopamine levels. This can then lead to compulsive shopping, as the shopper gets addicted to the dopamine hit that they get when purchasing items that they want, as the dopamine reward system is hyper stimulated (Hartston, 2012). In conclusion, the act of shopping releases dopamine, giving people a rush when they buy things as a reward.

In conclusion, dopamine, visual perception and cognitive styles all play a large part in how an individual completes their shop and which products they decide to purchase, as when an individual shops without a shopping list, they are more inclined to lean into impulsivity and new promotions.

Visual fields are imperative in how a person navigates the supermarket and has a heavy influence on what they result in purchasing. Cognitive styles provide a key insight into how different people’s styles will influence how they shop, making this a key factor in how supermarkets lay out their products and where they place items on the shelf. The reward and motivation mechanism involved in dopamine also provides insight into how individuals shop, and this information can be used to work out where to place displays to maximise purchasing, such as placing smaller treat items near the till so that people are more inclined to pick them up as a reward for completing their shop.

These factors could all be used to further enhance and optimise the layouts of supermarkets, but also to help people understand why they buy what they buy and which items the supermarkets are trying to influence them to buy. The dopamine reward system has the heaviest weight to it out of the factors, as if supermarkets can find a way to further tap into the shopper’s dopamine systems, they will maximise the number of products that the consumer is purchasing. Further research into this area and how to make the supermarket atmosphere lean into rewarding the dopamine system would prove beneficial to supermarkets, working out how things such as music, lighting and store layout can influence shoppers into more purchases.

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