Two experiments were designed to replicate and extend [Lindgaard et al.’s, 2006. Attention web designers: you have 50ms to make a good first impression! Behaviour and Information Technology 25(2), 115–126] findings that users can form immediate aesthetic impression of web pages, and that these impressions are highly stable. Using explicit (subjective evaluations) and implicit (response latency)...

In this paper, we empirically investigate an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM, Davis, 1989) to explain the individual acceptance and usage of websites. Conceptually, we examine perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, enjoyment, and their impact on attitude towards using, intention to use and actual use. The paper also introduces a new construct, “perceived visual attractiveness” of ...

Physical attractiveness is an important cue for social interaction. Psychology studies have long shown that physical attractiveness can elicit positive personality attributions as well as positive behaviour towards other people. This effect is explained by the attractiveness stereotype. In this paper, we investigate whether this stereotype apply to the interaction with virtual agents. We report...

The authors tested schematic information processing as a function of attractiveness stereotyping in two studies. An adult experimenter read children (ages 3 to 7 years) eight different stories in which a child narrator encountered two characters who varied in level of attractiveness and displayed positive or negative traits that were either consistent or inconsistent with the “beauty is good” s...

BACKGROUND Gardeners and park managers seeking to support biodiversity in urban areas often plant ornamentals attractive to flower-visiting insects. There is a huge diversity of garden plant varieties, and some recommendations are available as to which are attractive to insects. However, these are largely not based on rigorous empirical data. An important factor in consumer choice is the range ...

In this paper, we argue that the metaphor form of a comparison (i.e., a topic-vehicle pair) is preferred over, and more comprehensible than, the simile form when the interpretive diversity for that comparison is high. Interpretive diversity refers to the richness of the figurative meaning of a comparison; it is high to the extent that more features or properties are related to the figurative me...

MITJA D. BACK*, LARS PENKE, STEFAN C. SCHMUKLE, KAROLINE SACHSE, PETER BORKENAU and JENS B. ASENDORPF Department of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, UK Department of Psychology, Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany Department of Psychology, Martin-Lu...

We conduct a repeated VCM (voluntary contribution mechanism) experiment using the strategy method. We compare a partner and a stranger design and find that participants in the partner treatment provide (i) higher initial contributions, (ii) higher contributions on average over all periods, and (iii) contributions that do not vary more strongly with past contributions than participants in the st...

Attractiveness plays a central role in human non-verbal communication and has been broadly examined in diverse subfields of contemporary psychology. Researchers have garnered compelling evidence in support of the evolutionary functions of physical attractiveness and its role in our daily lives, while at the same time, having largely ignored the significant contribution of non-visual modalities ...