Abstract
Every day, people make many food decisions without thinking, repeatedly falling for the unhealthy option instead of the healthy option. While making these mindless decisions, people often rely on heuristics. In this paper, we demonstrate that these heuristics can be exploited to nudge consumers towards healthy alternatives. Specifically, we explore how the attraction effect (i.e., adding a decoy to a choice set) can nudge people to choose a healthy snack. The results of our choice experiment indicate that adding a decoy (i.e., a less attractive food alternative) to a self-control situation (i.e., choosing between a healthy and an unhealthy food alternative) can help people maintain self-control and choose the healthy option. This mixed choice set thus nudges people towards the healthy option. Moreover, our results show differential effects of the attraction effect depending on the (un)healthiness of the products in the choice set. Specifically, the attraction effect is prominent when the choice set consists of unhealthy products only (i.e., the unhealthy choice set), but not in the choice set that consists of only healthy products (i.e., healthy choice set). Importantly, our results indicate when the attraction effect can exploit consumers' heuristics to help them make better, healthier food choices.
Highlights
Despite their good intentions to eat healthier, people, without thinking, often choose unhealthy food instead of healthy options as a result of impulsive tendencies [1]
We ran binary logistic regressions in each choice set to test whether the choice share of the target option in the decoy condition differs from the share in the no-decoy condition
In line with our predictions, our results indicate that the attraction effect is not effective for every food product category
Summary
Despite their good intentions to eat healthier, people, without thinking, often choose unhealthy food instead of healthy options as a result of impulsive tendencies [1]. Food decisions are often made impulsively, overriding people’s long-term goal of eating healthy This is true because people make many decisions each day and often lack the resources to make rational, well-considered decisions [2, 3]. The attraction effect is one of the most well-known and effective strategies to make a particular choice option dominating, and offers a potentially viable route to trigger healthy choices. This frequently investigated context effect has an influence on the purchase behavior of consumers, especially when people’s choices are based on heuristics [7].
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