Deception and Shopping Behavior Among Current Cigarette Smokers: A Web-Based, Randomized Virtual Shopping Experiment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Virtual stores can be used to identify influences on consumer shopping behavior. Deception is one technique that may be used to attempt to increase the realism of virtual stores. OBJECTIVE: The objective of the experiment was to test whether the purchasing behavior of participants in a virtual shopping task varied based on whether they were told that they would receive the products they selected in a virtual convenience store (a form of deception) or not. METHODS: We recruited a US national sample of 402 adult current smokers by email from an online panel of survey participants. They completed a fully automated randomized virtual shopping experiment with a US $15 or US $20 budget in a Web-based virtual convenience store. We told a random half of participants that they would receive the products they chose in the virtual store or the cash equivalent (intervention condition), and the other random half simply to conduct a shopping task (control condition). We tested for differences in demographics, tobacco use behaviors, and in-store purchases (outcome variable, assessed by questionnaire) by experimental condition. RESULTS: The characteristics of the participants (398/402, 99.0% with complete data) were comparable across conditions except that the intervention group contained slightly more female participants (103/197, 52.3%) than the control group (84/201, 41.8%; P=.04). We did not find any other significant differences in any other demographic variables or tobacco use, or in virtual store shopping behaviors, including purchasing any tobacco (P=.44); purchasing cigarettes (P=.16), e-cigarettes (P=.54), cigars (P=.98), or smokeless tobacco (P=.72); amount spent overall (P=.63) or on tobacco (P=.66); percentage of budget spent overall (P=.84) or on tobacco (P=.74); number of total items (P=.64) and tobacco items purchased (P=.54); or total time spent in the store (P=.07). CONCLUSIONS: We found that telling participants that they will receive the products they select in a virtual store did not influence their purchases. This finding suggests that deception may not affect consumer behavior and, as a result, may not be necessary in virtual shopping experiments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it