Imagine visiting a commercial Web site that has a rich and colorful graphical background. Is it possible that this background could influence the products you buy? Would these effects occur even if you were knowledgeable about the products offered? Most of our respondents, both experts and novices, tell us that they would be unaffected, but our results suggest otherwise – that even subtle changes in a Web environment can produce changes in the products selected for both expert and novice decision makers.

In this article, we use online experiments to examine how priming affects the construction of preferences (Fischhoff, 1991; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993; Slovic, 1995) and explore the possibility that priming effects operate through external search as well as internal retrieval. Prior research in priming has demonstrated the resulting increase in accessibility of certain product-related information, suggesting that priming effects are primarily limited to memory-based choice. However, we examine the possibility that priming can change external search, thereby influencing stimulus-based choice. We argue that these effects operate in a manner similar to what Bruner (1957) termed “perceptual readiness” and what Higgins (1996, p. 136) suggests are “goals… that produce a readiness to respond to certain goal relevant stimuli.”

We also examine how priming might work in the applied setting of online commerce. Because the Internet environment reduces consumer search costs and puts consumers in control of the information they receive, many have argued that the Internet empowers consumers.