Why Consumers Trust Some Digital Experiences More Than Others
Digital trust is built from competence, integrity and benevolence signals — and undone by small inconsistencies long before any breach occurs.
Insights
Articles and perspectives from Hamid Reza Mohagheghi examining psychology, consumer behavior, decision-making, marketing, and the relationship between humans and technology.
All articles
The Psychology of Technology Adoption
Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social influence and risk explain adoption better than the objective capability of a technology.
The Psychology Behind AI Recommendations
People accept algorithmic advice readily until they see it err, then abandon it faster than they abandon a human adviser making the same mistake.
The Privacy Paradox in Digital Consumption
Stated privacy concern predicts disclosure behavior weakly. Context, control cues and uncertainty explain the gap better than hypocrisy does.
The Intention-Behaviour Gap and What It Means for Measurement
Stated intention is a weak predictor of behavior. Research designs that ignore this produce confident findings that fail in the field.
Persuasion Knowledge and Advertising Scepticism
Consumers develop working theories about how they are being persuaded, and those theories change how any given tactic lands.
Personalization, Trust and the Modern Consumer
Personalization raises relevance and, past a threshold, raises discomfort. The turning point is about inference rather than accuracy.
Online Reviews and the Limits of Social Information
Ratings carry real information and real distortion: selection bias, herding and strategic manipulation all shape what a star rating means.
Mental Accounting and Price Perception
People do not treat money as fungible. How a price is framed, bundled and timed changes what the same amount feels like.
Loss Aversion and Consumer Decision-Making
Losses loom larger than gains — but the effect has boundaries, and recent work questions how universal the classic asymmetry really is.
Human Attention in an Algorithmic Environment
Attention is a limited, contested resource. Ranking systems optimised for engagement compete for it against the person's own goals.
How Social Proof Influences Digital Consumer Decisions
Social proof works through informational and normative routes, and online it compounds: early signals shape later ones until popularity becomes self-fulfilling.
How Interface Design Changes Consumer Behavior
Layout, defaults, ordering and effort are not neutral containers for a decision. They are part of the decision.
Habit Formation in Digital Products
Habits are cue-driven and context-bound. Most of what products call habit is actually repeated intention, which is far more fragile.
Friction and Effort in the Consumer Journey
Small effort costs suppress behavior far more than their objective size suggests — and selectively adding friction can improve decisions.
Ethical Persuasion vs. Manipulation in Digital Marketing
The line between persuasion and manipulation is not about effectiveness. It runs through whether the influence survives disclosure.
Default Effects and Choice Architecture
Defaults are among the strongest known influences on behavior, working through effort, implied endorsement and reference-point effects.
Dark Patterns and Consumer Autonomy
Deceptive interface practices are measurable, widespread and increasingly regulated. Their common feature is exploiting the gap between attention and consent.
Choice Overload: When More Options Produce Worse Decisions
More assortment does not reliably reduce satisfaction. Choice overload depends on task difficulty, preference uncertainty and decision goals.
Algorithm Aversion and Algorithm Appreciation
The literature appears contradictory until you separate task type, error visibility and whether the person can modify the algorithm's output.
Continue
Each article develops one strand of the wider research interests. New pieces are added after editorial review rather than on a schedule.