Facing it: assessing the immediate emotional impacts of calorie labelling using automatic facial coding

Kate Laffan,Paul Dolan,Cass Sunstein

doi:10.1017/bpp.2021.32

Abstract

AbstractAlthough there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people's behaviour, most studies stop far short of consumer welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to provide insights into the consumer welfare impact of nudges using willingness to pay and subjective well-being reports and explore an unobtrusive approach that can speak to the immediate emotional impacts of a nudge: automatic facial expression coding. In an exploratory lab study, we use facial expression coding to assess the short-run emotional impact of being presented with calorie information about a popcorn snack in the context of a stylised ‘Cinema experience’. The results of the study indicate that calorie information has heterogeneous impacts on people's likelihood of choosing the snack and on the emotions they experience during the moment of choice which varies based on their level of health-consciousness. The information does not, however, affect the emotions people go on to experience while viewing movie clips, suggesting that the emotional effects of the information are short-lived. We conclude by emphasising the potential of automatic facial expression coding to provide new insights into the immediate emotional impacts of nudges and calling for further research into this promising technique.

Highlights

Informed approaches to public policy have gained traction over the past decade (OECD, 2017; Troussard & Van Bavel, 2018), especially choice-preserving interventions that steer people’s behaviour in specific directions (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009; Loewenstein & Chater, 2017)
We study the immediate emotional impact of a behavioural intervention that has been incorporated into policy in the US since 2014: namely, the mandatory provision of calorie information on movie theatre snack menus (US Food and Drug Administration, 2014)
Upon arrival at the lab, we briefed all participants on the use of webcams, and they provided consent to participate in the study and for their facial expressions to be captured on camera and later analysed using automatic facial expression coding software

Summary

Introduction

Informed approaches to public policy have gained traction over the past decade (OECD, 2017; Troussard & Van Bavel, 2018), especially choice-preserving interventions that steer people’s behaviour in specific directions (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009; Loewenstein & Chater, 2017). We explore an unobtrusive approach that sheds new light on the immediate emotional effects of nudges – an important component of their consumer welfare impact that has previously been assessed using self-report measures. Our approach involves using automatic facial expression coding to capture the immediate emotional impacts of behavioural interventions. Automatic facial expression coding is increasingly used to capture individuals’ emotions for a variety of purposes, including marketing research where it has been used to measure individuals’ responses to online advertising (Teixeira et al, 2012); clinical settings where it has been used to monitor patients’ depression symptoms (Girard et al, 2013); and public policy research to assess individuals’ responses to bureaucratic red tape (Hattke et al, 2020). Automatic facial coding has not yet been used to examine people’s emotional responses to behaviourally informed interventions, including nudges

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion