Does a Blurry Background Make a High Roller? The Effects of Blurry Versus Sharp Backgrounds on Consumers’ Risk-Taking Behavior

Blurry backgrounds are now ubiquitous in visual ads and in the design of apps and websites. Various online businesses adopted blurry backgrounds in their commercial webpage with blurry backgrounds perceived as cool and stunning (Kamps 2013). The question we ask is: is the use of blurriness simply a matter of aesthetic considerations or is it possible that the use of blurred backgrounds can impact consumer decisions, for example when choosing a hotel to stay at or purchasing a lottery ticket? Aerial perspective theory hypothesizes that spatially distant objects appear blurrier than do spatially nearer objects (Palmer and Brooks 2008). Further, construal level theory (CLT; Trope and Liberman 2010) suggests that greater spatial distance activates a high-level construal (Liberman and Förster 2009), which in turn increases risktaking by promoting sensitivity to payoff (Sagristano et al. 2002). By connecting these two distinct literatures, our work leads to a novel prediction: the use of blurry backgrounds could activate a high-level construal, which in turn could facilitate consumers’ risk-taking. We report six experiments that collectively explore our theorizing. We first ran two pilot studies to examine the aerial perspective theory empirically. In Pilot Study 1a (N=570), we manipulated four levels of blurriness (from 0% to 3%) of the two photos showing horizontally juxtaposed objects (i.e., trees or houses). Participants assigned to a 2 (photo type: houses vs. trees) x 4 (blurriness: 0% vs. 1% vs. 2% vs. 3%) between-subjects design saw one of eight photos and estimated how far the objects were located. The results showed that participants’ perceived distance of the objects increased linearly in proportion to the level of blurriness. Pilot Study 1b (N=215) adopted a 3 (photo type: houses vs. trees vs. buildings) x 3 (blurriness: 0% vs. 5% vs. 10%) mixed-design with photo type as a within-subjects factor, where only backgrounds (not target objects) were blurred and a categorization task (Wakslak et al. 2006) was included to assess participants’ construal level. This study found that participants’ perceived distance increased linearly in proportion to the level of blurriness, while their levels of construal linearly decreased. Bootstrapping results (5000 resamples) yielded a significant indirect effect of blurry backgrounds on construal through perceived distance.