Internet Psychologist
The latest articles from Internet Psychologist and Business Academic, Graham Jones
People love buying things – or so we are led to believe. Current psychological thinking suggests that as we spend ever more isolated lives, going shopping plugs an emotional gap in our lives. Depression is known to lead to increased spending, for instance. Shopping and buying things helps us so …
Eye tracking studies show a fairly constant pattern of where we look on a web page. Essentially, most of our attention is focused top left. Then we scan to the right and then zig-zag back and forth to roughly half-way down the screen before we give up. It’s almost …
People are affected by colour. For instance, traffic lights tell us to “stop” with red; we associate the colour red with danger (unless you have red-green colour blindness of course). Similarly, we associate green with positive things, action, “go”. Other colours also tell us things; on the Internet blue signals …
Twitter could become a victim of its own success. The microblogging service has had an amazing 974% increase in traffic in the past year. According to Alexa, the site is now the 213th most popular web site in the UK and the 144th most viewed site in the USA. Around …
Online retailers have failed to listen to their customers. The latest research on Internet retailers shows that they have changed almost nothing on their web sites – even though they were told a year ago what consumers wanted. For instance, customers want 0800 or toll-free numbers on the web site. …
David Friend is doing the right thing – but rather too late. Who is David Friend you may ask. Well, he’s the CEO of Carbonite, one of the most popular online backup services. The problem is, his staff don’t appear to have been doing the right thing – at least …
Where do they get their information from in Government? Are they secretly living in some underground colony where the world is different to the one you and I live in? Or are they all so gullible they fall for anything anyone with a sharp suit tells them? Take today – …
We already know that many Internet users contribute content to the web. Take YouTube, for instance, which reportedly has around 15 hours of video uploaded to it every minute…! Not all of that video is professionally produced, business material. Most is what we’d call “user generated content”. Already, just over …
My phone rang yesterday with a client curious about how the world knew about the Hudson River air crash before any news channels were carrying the story. Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, blogs – they all played their part. But for the traditional news media they simply couldn’t run the story …
Ordinary people – the likes of you and me – are often bemused about decisions taken by politicians and those in the “establishment”. Today we see two seemingly different decisions – one about the charity appeal for suffering in Gaza and the other for the reclassification of cannabis as a …
Business owners have a variety of ways in which they relate to their company’s web site. And not all of these relationships are good. Rather like a child, a web site is your offspring and it continues to develop. Anyone who believes you set up a web site and then …
Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered that we just love big numbers. In fact, the bigger the better it seems. The study has important implications for anyone in business – particularly online where people are looking for the prices of your products and services rather keenly. Here’s what the …
President Obama was responsible yesterday for a significant slow down in much of the Internet. During his inauguration more people than ever before decided to watch the speech online, rather than on TV. More people than ever before posted status updates on Facebook, saying they were watching the speech. And …
Internet retailers are trying all sorts of techniques to sell stuff online without any real knowledge as to whether their techniques are likely to work. That’s the conclusion you can draw form research conducted by Cormetrics which reveals that few people selling via the Internet actually analyse what they are …
Most people who download music from the Internet do it illegally. According to a new industry-backed survey 95% of all music downloaded from the Internet is from “pirate” sites. This morning on BBC Radio Five Live, a UK industry spokesman came out with the same, old, tired arguments that if …