Generational Gender Differences in the Role of Time in 360-Virtual Shopping

Generational differences shape how individuals engage with digital technologies. Immersive shopping environments, such as 360-virtual stores, impair consumer attention, often leading to a loss of temporal awareness and predisposing to unplanned purchases. Given that individuals’ sense of time passing varies with age and gender, we set up a study in a 360-degree virtual store to study how time distortion and telepresence in a 360-virtual environment influence impulse buying behavior differently across generational cohorts and generational gender groups. The results show that time distortion significantly increases impulse buying, but our cross-generational analysis suggests that this effect is only significant for Millennials. When we split generational cohorts across gender, we find that the effect of time distortion on impulse buying is significant also for Generation Z and Generation X, but for females only. The effect is non-significant for Baby Boomers, while telepresence further boosts the effect for Millennial women.