The subtle way background color and music affect our decision-making

Have you ever wondered why you make certain choices, even when you believe you're making them all on your own? The answer might lie in a psychological phenomenon known as priming. The "priming effect" is often cited as an example of how the brain can be influenced by seemingly irrelevant situations. The priming effect refers to the change in a person's behavior due to a presented primer (“stimulus” in academic term).

What makes the priming effect so interesting is that seemingly unrelated stimuli such as color, music, location, and smell can subconsciously influence people's decision-making.

In one example, a fictitious car website selling two different cars employed either a green background or a red background on the welcome page.

On the site with the green background, 74% of respondents chose the price-oriented, or cheaper but less safe, model and 34% chose the safety-oriented, or safer but more expensive, model. The green background primed price so more customers chose the less expensive and less safe car. However, on the site with a red background, the number of respondents who chose the safety-oriented model increased to 50%. The color red primed people to think about safety more and thus led to more people choosing the safer but more expensive car.

Here’s another experiment on the priming effect—this time with wine purchasing.

A wine store in the United Kingdom changed the music played in the store each day for two weeks to study how background music can affect wine sales. The store sold French and German wines and these wines were in the same price range and the same sweetness. Additionally, they also changed the placement of each wine depending on the day so that location would not be factored into the results.

The results showed that on days when French background music was played, 83% of customers bought French wine. Conversely, on days when German background music was played, 73% of customers bought German wine.

What’s even more interesting is that the researchers had the consumers fill out a survey after their purchase. When asked to state explicitly whether or not they thought the music had influenced their choice of wine, only about 14% of the respondents said that the music influenced their choice.

From these two examples, it’s clear that both background music and background visuals can influence the selection of certain products and these choices are largely not consciously recognized. So, if you're in charge of designing environments where people make decisions, it's important to be aware and take note of what associations you may be subconsciously creating for your consumers. However, if you're often finding yourself on the side of the consumer, maybe pay extra attention to the environment you're making decisions in and think about how it may be leading you to choose one product over another.