Effects of Restaurant Interior Elements on Social Dining Behavior

Abstract

Today’s customers tend to select eating-places to satisfy pleasures through experiential socialization. This study explores how colors, lighting and décor have effects on customers’ perceived social, emotional and behavioral intention on social dining occasions. The experimental method is used and 162 senior students are involved. The results show that the restaurant with monochromatic color scheme, dim lighting and plain décors yield a statistically significant difference on the entire dependent variables with almost any other interior conditions observed on romantic dining, as opposed to that in the case of casual dining. Further research on subtler and diverse dimensions of interior element is suggested to enrich previous findings. Keywords: Interior elements, perceived sociability, emotion, social dining behaviour. eISSN 2514-751X © 2017 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.