A curated literature library for a Consumer Behaviour research course: 100+ peer-reviewed papers, plus the lecture decks that frame them.
- What: A topic-organized library of academic PDFs (with a few PPTX lecture decks) used to research and write up four themes in modern consumer behaviour: decision making, the neuroscience of spontaneous thought, virtual influencers and social-media unreality, and what drives social-media followers to actually buy.
- Who: Compiled by Gyanesh Samanta as part of a graduate-level Consumer Behaviour research module.
- When: First commit 2025-09-27, last update 2026-03-28.
- Where: Coursework and term-paper research repository.
- Why: Each topic has dozens of fragmented sources — keeping them all in one repo makes it possible to grep filenames, build a reading list, and hand the bundle to a teammate without rebuilding the search.
Each top-level folder is one focused research question, populated with the papers that directly speak to it. Filenames keep the publication years and titles intact so the corpus reads like a self-explanatory bibliography:
- Decision Making — bundles the lecture decks (introductions to neuroscience and decision making, plus perceptual decision-making slides) with foundational research on cognitive load, AI-assisted decisions, attention checks in survey research, and affect in judgement. The reference for the popular framing is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
- The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought — built around the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought and a curated set of mind-wandering / self-generated-thought papers, with a draft writeup (
mind-wandering LR.docx) layered on top. - Social media is making us feel unreal — ~30 papers on virtual influencers: their authenticity vs. humanlikeness, the uncanny valley in marketing, well-being effects of self-comparison, and AI-driven thematic visualization on Facebook research.
- When do Social Media Followers Purchase — ~25 papers on the influencer-to-purchase pipeline: trust, parasocial relationships, live-streaming e-commerce, beauty/aesthetic labour, and a 2025 meta-analytic review of influencer-marketing effectiveness.
Together the folders are deliberately heavier on primary sources than on commentary — the goal was to be able to cite the actual studies rather than summaries of them.
- Format: PDF (papers) and PPTX (lecture decks), plus a DOCX literature-review draft.
- Tooling: Any PDF reader; Word / PowerPoint or LibreOffice for the editable files.
Consumer-Behaviour/
├── Decision Making/
│ ├── Presentations/ # lecture slide decks
│ └── Research Papers/ # ~30 PDFs on decision making + neuroscience
├── The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought/
│ ├── Mind wandering-attention-short attention span/
│ ├── self-generated thought/
│ ├── The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought.pdf
│ └── mind-wandering LR.docx
├── Social media is making us feel unreal/ # ~30 PDFs on virtual influencers
├── When do Social Media Followers Purchase/ # ~25 PDFs on follower → purchase
└── README.md
This repo holds documents only — no code to run.
# 1. Clone (note: large download due to PDFs)
git clone https://github.com/GyaneshSamanta/Consumer-Behaviour.git
cd Consumer-Behaviour
# 2. Browse a topic and open whatever you need
open "Decision Making/Research Papers/"If you only want the file listing without pulling all the PDFs, use a shallow / sparse clone.
Personal research library — external PRs aren't expected. Issues flagging mis-titled or duplicated files are welcome.
The PDFs and PPTX lecture decks are owned by their respective authors / publishers and are kept here strictly for personal study under fair-use academic norms. Do not redistribute commercially.
- Curator: Gyanesh Samanta — @GyaneshSamanta
- Sources: Authors and publishers credited inside each PDF's metadata.