That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Impulse Shopping

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Have you ever wondered why you impulse shop - what causes you to add something to your Amazon cart and buy it? In this episode Dr. K will review the neuroscience that explains why we impulse shop.

Hi, my name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Everyone's done it. Everyone is impulse shopped. You might have been walking through the mall and seen something and rushed over and bought it. Or you might have been browsing Amazon and just clicked add to cart and hit purchase before you even really thought about it. We've all done it. We've all impulse shopped. But why do we do it?

On today's podcast, we're going to talk about the neuroscience of impulse shopping. Before we can truly explain impulse shopping, we have to talk about decision making and the neuroscience of decision making. At the end of the day, decision making comes down to making a choice. You have to choose to buy something or not to buy something, or you might be thinking about what to buy. Let's go back to the mall. Imagine you're hungry and you go to the food court and you're thinking to yourself, what do I want for lunch today? Do I want some pizza or do I feel more like sushi? Well, from a decision-making perspective, we say that each of those two choices, the choice to buy sushi or the choice to buy pizza, has a value.

Now, that value is not the financial value, although that can be a part of it. But it's more of a representation of the worth of the item to you. How much do you really want it or how much do you really value it? Economists call this utility, which is another phrase for this. To really understand value, think of your favorite sweater.

It might not have a lot of financial worth anymore because you've had it for a long time, but it has a lot of value to you. It's sentimental. So decision-making comes down to making a choice, deciding between two or more values. And typically, we just go with the highest value option. So if we think of our lunch example at the mall, if you're someone that really likes sushi, then sushi will have a higher value than pizza. And when you make your choice, you'll choose sushi because higher value than pizza. And when you make your choice,

you'll choose sushi because the value is higher. And conversely, if you're someone that really likes pizza, you'll choose pizza because pizza has a higher value to you. Let's use another example. Imagine you're thinking about where to go on your next holiday. You're thinking about going skiing or you're thinking about going to the beach. Each of those choices has value. If you're thinking about going skiing or you're thinking about going to the beach each of those choices has value if you're someone that likes skiing skiing might have a higher value if you're someone that's into tanning in the sun then the beach might have a higher value and of course these values can change through experience and sometimes we don't even take the highest value sometimes we deliberately choose a lower value item, but we're going to deal with that on another episode and get back to impulse shopping. So why do we impulse shop? Well, from what I've just told you, presumably the choice to buy the item is higher than the choice to not buy the item. And in terms of the item in question,

the value for that item is higher than the value for other items that are available. the value for that item is higher than the value for other items that are available. But still, that doesn't really explain why we do it. To understand impulse shopping, we have to take a dive into our emotional system, and in particular, a part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala are two midbrain structures, one on the left and one on the right, attached to the front of the human hippocampus. And the amygdala appeared to play a very important role in emotional processing. Early research on the amygdala looked at the response of this region to faces. People were in MRI scanners, and specifically functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners, that allow us to measure neural responses, And they were shown

faces that were either happy or sad or didn't have an emotional valence. And what the researchers found that did that work was that the amygdala was more active to the emotional faces, the happy and sad faces, than it was to the neutral faces. There's a lot of other research in this area and it always shows a similar result. The amygdala seems more activated when something emotional is happening. Here's a tidbit on the amygdala that might explain something. Your amygdala is more activated when you're super tired. So if you've ever been emotional when you're really, really tired, that's your amygdala. And that's because it's working overtime. So if we think back to impulse shopping and why we make the choice we do, what's really going on here? Well, what's happening is the amygdala is adding value and it's adding value to the choice to buy something.

It's that emotional charge. And at a literal level within your brain, it's pushing up the value to buy the item. So when you have that competition between buy and not buy, the amygdala is there, and it's supercharging the value to buy the item. So you buy it. Because when we get down to decision-making, you choose the higher value item. So think about it. When you're wandering through the mall before you buy the item, your amygdala is probably not responding and you're continuing wandering through the mall. And then you see the item and there's an emotional response and all of a sudden it supercharges the value to buy the item. So you rush out and you do it. You go buy the item. Now you need a little bit more than the amygdala to explain decision making and impulse shopping.

As it turns out, there's another part of the brain involved in decision making, and that's the prefrontal cortex. Now the prefrontal cortex is your rational decision making system. There's a ton of research on the prefrontal cortex. It's been shown to play a really important role in decision making, which is why we're talking about it now, but it also plays important role in decision making, which is why we're talking about it now, but it also plays a role in working memory. It's the part of the brain that helps you pull that item back from where it's been stored and allows you to manipulate it and use it. The prefrontal cortex plays a role in task switching. So you're working on something

and you know you have to switch and do something else. Well, that's your prefrontal cortex. A lot of researchers talk about the prefrontal cortex in terms of executive control. It's the part of the brain that's sort of running the whole operation. But like I said, the prefrontal cortex plays a role in decision-making as well. And again, it plays a role in those value assessments. Just as your amygdala might be supercharging the value to impulse shop and buy the item, Just as your amygdala might be supercharging the value to impulse shop and buy the item, the prefrontal cortex plays a role in impulse shopping as well. It's the rational part of your brain kicking in, saying,

we don't really need that item. Maybe we should save our money. Maybe we should think about it. So the prefrontal cortex is adding value to the choice to not buy the item in question. So in terms of impulse shopping, these two brain systems, the emotional system and the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are in a tug of war. They're literally fighting each other and they're adding value to the choice. Buy, not buy, buy, not buy, walk away, don't walk away, walk away, don't walk away. And essentially, if you impulse shop, what it means is the amygdala has won. It's added enough value to the choice to buy the item that that's what

you end up doing. Now, there's a little bit more to it than that. Why does walking away and thinking about it reduce impulse shopping? If you don't know that, it's true. If you ever want to not impulse shop, just take a bit of time to think about what you're doing. Walk to the other end of the mall and come back and people tend not to buy. Well, why does that work? The old adage of counting to 30. Well, it has to do with the time course of neural activity in these brain regions. The amygdala has a rapid time course. The response in the amygdala rises very quickly, adding value to the choice to buy. And it goes down very quickly.

And the prefrontal cortex, it's a little bit slower. It's kind of like the hare and the turtle. The amygdala is the hare and it rapidly adds value to the choice to buy. And the turtle, the prefrontal cortex, is slowly adding value to the choice not to buy. the prefrontal cortex is slowly adding value to the choice not to buy. So by counting to 30, you're literally letting the activity in the amygdala die down, reducing the value on the choice to buy or to impulse shop, and you're letting the value of the choice to not buy coming from the prefrontal cortex to increase.

So time plays a crucial role in this. Theygdala responds rapidly which is why most impulse shopping is spontaneous and the prefrontal cortex well it's a little bit slower to come along but when it does it's your rational brain telling you to save your money if you think about this in other contexts this is why most crime is spontaneous the decision to shoplift is rarely premeditated. Now, of course, in some instances it is, but most times impulse shopping is an impulsive thing. The person's in the store and they just take the item. Well, what is that?

That's your amygdala. It's adding value to the choice to quickly grab the item and try to walk out of the store with it. And most people don't impulse shop if it's deliberative. to the choice to quickly grab the item and try to walk out of the store with it. And most people don't impulse shop if it's deliberative. Taking a long time to think about it and go, I think I'll go down to the mall and I think I'll steal something. Well, your prefrontal cortex has time to kick in and reduce the value for making that choice.

And sadly, if we move on to more serious crimes like murder, this is the case as well. Most murders are spontaneous. And why is that? Because the amygdala is adding value to the choice to kill someone. And the prefrontal cortex, if you give it time, will add value to the choice to not do this. Which is why, like I said, most murders are spontaneous. Premeditated murder is a hard thing to do, and that's mostly because your prefrontal cortex is adding value to the choice not to kill someone.

Interestingly, with this one, you could also come up with an argument that the amygdala is also adding value to the choice not to kill someone. It's one of those things where the amygdala is sort of on both sides of the fence. So back to impulse shopping, just to review. The reason you do it is you're making a choice to buy. And we've talked about that. That's the higher value choice. But the reason it's higher is because the amygdala has biased your values. It's added value to the choice to buy the item.

And because the amygdala responds rapidly, you do it spontaneously. But like we said, if you wait and count to 30, the prefrontal cortex kicks in and you choose not to buy the item. Well, there's some other factors that affect this as well, and we may as well discuss them briefly before we wrap things up. Sleep, for instance. As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, when you're tired, your amygdala is sort of in overdrive. So you're more likely to impulse shop when you're really, really tired. So I guess the take-home message here would be, if you don't have a good night's sleep, don't open up your web browser and go to Amazon. You might regret what happens. There's some other factors as well.

For instance, alcohol. What does alcohol do? Well, alcohol is known to increase the emotional response of the amygdala. And at the same time, it's also decreasing the response of the prefrontal cortex. So in terms of impulse shopping, alcohol is literally increasing your desire to buy things. And it's literally shutting down the system that's sitting there saying you don't really need that item you shouldn't get that of course there's individual differences as well our emotional responses and the strength of our response from the prefrontal cortex vary between us some people are able to regulate their activity of the amygdala or at least monitor it better than others so some of us listen to our amygdala and it supercharges those values more than it does for other people. And at the same time, some of us, well, our prefrontal cortex is more activated

and it works a little bit more efficiently. So we're more logical and rational when we do these things. I'll mention one little final piece of this. There's the role of dopamine. Now, we're going to talk about dopamine a lot in later episodes. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that's associated with reward. It's one of the reasons that Facebook is so addictive. Well, this also plays a role in impulse shopping. The dopamine system, when you buy something, supercharges it because it's fun and it's exciting and it's rewarding. So that active impulse shopping gives you a little boost of dopamine and that's a reinforcing thing that you want to do. So there's this additional factor that's also playing a role in why we impulse shop. So let's review before we end. Why do we impulse shop? There's a choice

to buy the item, and there's a choice to not buy the item. And what's happening is the amygdala is an emotional response. It's supercharging the value to buy the item. And if you give it a bit of time, because as we discussed, the time course of the amygdala is rapid. The activity spikes quickly, and it goes down quickly. So if you wait a little bit, your prefrontal cortex or your rational decision system will kick in and it will tell you to, hey, let's not buy the item. And as we discussed earlier, it's a tug of war. You've got your emotional system supercharging the value to buy the item, and you've got your logical system slowly kicking in to tell you to not buy the item. And finally, as I mentioned at the end, there's dopamine.

When you do impulse shop, you've got this little neurotransmitter that's rewarding you for doing so. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. You can follow me on Twitter at That Neurosci Guy, or you can check out my webpage and blog at thatneuroscienceguy.com. Thanks for listening today, and we'll see you on the next episode.