The comparability of consumers’ behavior in virtual reality and real life: a validation study of virtual reality based on a ranking task

Abstract

The comparability or similarity of consumers' behavior in virtual reality (VR) and in real life (RL) is indispensable to successfully take advantage of VR technology in consumer behavior (CB) research. This study investigated the comparability of participants' behavior in a virtual environment and in RL to validate VR for data acquisition in CB research. Participants (N = 98) were randomly assigned to a RL condition or a VR condition in which the settings were chosen to mimic a RL environment as closely as possible. In both conditions, participants ranked 20 types of commercial breakfast cereal by their perceived healthiness from healthy to unhealthy. We observed that the perceived healthiness of the 20 cereals in the VR and RL conditions were highly correlated (r(s) = 0.91, p < .001, N = 20). The information-seeking behavior was not different between the two conditions, t (96) = - 1.11, p = .27. Furthermore, the attributes employed by the participants to evaluate the healthiness of the cereals did not vary between the two conditions. The presence level of the participants in the virtual environment was also examined. The results illustrate that the participants' behavior in the virtual environment and in the real world were comparable, which provides robust evidence for the validity of VR as a beneficial and promising tool for data acquisition in CB research.