Abstract
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•Visual complexity surrounding a focal product diminishes the perceived size of that product.•This effect occurs due to shifted attention away from the product and reduced processing fluency.•These effects appear to be robust to the presence of neighboring products of known sizes.
Although prior scholarship has demonstrated important effects of visual complexity on product perceptions, the relationship between the visual complexity of a product’s environment and that product’s perceived size remains unexplored. Because size is such an important product characteristic in many consumer contexts, the lack of exploration of this relationship leaves a significant gap in the literature on size perceptions, especially in relation to the retailing domain. The present investigation seeks to document the relationship between environmental visual complexity and the perceived size of a product. Namely, five studies show that high visual complexity decreases consumer size perceptions of a focal product through a serial mediation process in which high complexity pulls consumer attention away from the focal product. This shifted attention decreases processing fluency and leads consumers to perceptually minimize size to avoid information overload in the processing of a display. Even after ruling out potential influences of referent information (study 5) and alternative explanations of affective processing and perceived depth (study 4), these effects hold. The findings have implications for both theory and practice, shedding light on the relationship between size perceptions of a focal object and its environment.