Shoppers fall for fake tech specs

The bigger the number the better (even if it's nonsense)

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24 October 2008 14:24 GMT / By Katie Scott

It seems bigger is better when it comes to tech specs and people shopping online.

Even if we consumers have absolutely no idea what we're being quoted - whether gigahertz to DPI - we always believe that the higher the figure, the better the gadget.

This is according to a study by the Journal of Consumer Research, which researched the difference between "how we perceive an item based on experience, and how we view the item based on what we know about it".

So the team basically tested how much we "liking" an item weighsup in importance against the specs.

The hypothesis was that consumers will base their decisions on specifications when buying something and the guinea pigs were students at a Chinese university.

The key test involved camera megapixels. The team took a single image but used Photoshop with one to bump up the colours and also sharpened the pic.

The students were for the camera which they thought had taken the sharper image.

But then, interestingly, when specs were produced for the two "different models", the students were for the camera with the higher specs even though it was the one that had "produced" the lesser of the two images.