Abstract
•Color lightness increases purchase intentions toward softer products.•Anticipated comfort mediates the effect on purchase intentions.•Haptically relevant information about the product moderates the effect.•Haptic priming & perceptual transference from adjacent objects moderate the effect.•Actual touch decreases the intensity of the effect but does not erase it.
The goal of this work is to investigate the influence of the color lightness-softness correspondence on a key product attribute: anticipated comfort. Across six studies, our results confirm that color lightness and product softness share a correspondence that is experienced across color hues and products. This correspondence leads to higher purchase intentions for products for which softness is desirable, and anticipated comfort mediates this effect. Further, haptic transference from adjacent objects, haptic priming through imagined touch, and haptic information relevance moderate the effects, and the intensity of effects declines once actual touch is possible, but the effects remain significant. We also rule out multiple alternative explanations (e.g., processing fluency, anticipated weight, arousal, product category color lightness expectations, and foreground-background contrast).