Project

Emotions as nudges: Emotional reinforcement for healthy foods

Central to this project is the design of effective emotional nudges that make the healthy product more attractive (rather than emphasise its healthy features) and can be delivered through the sensory properties of the product itself or through its package. Nudges are defined as small/subtle rearrangements of the decision context that make the desired (here: healthy) choice the easy choice, while leaving consumers’ freedom of choice unaffected.

Healthier foods (e.g., those with low salt, fat, or sugar) lead to lower hedonic evaluation and decreased satiating properties, putting these products at a disadvantage compared with their full salt, fat, and sugar competitors. One way of overcoming this disadvantage is to render other properties of healthier foods more reinforcing via nudges that elicit positive emotions.

Current health improvement strategies rely on knowledge/educating people to make "healthy choices". These educating strategies often require conscious processing and self-control. However, eating is not mere necessity it is a pleasurable event and food choices and preferences are not made rational and conscious, but rather intuitive, impulsive and unconscious. Hence, although it certainly is important to raise awareness and incentivize people towards healthier eating, other approaches relying on intuitive, unconscious processes need to be adopted to make sure strategies also lead to a desired “behavioural change” towards a healthy diet. This project thus will investigate possibilities of emotional nudges to suggest healthier food choices.

Deliverables: specification of guidelines for using emotional cues as nudges in products and on packages that promote healthy food choices.

Design rules for emotional nudges
Interpreting emotional and other nudges
Robustness of emotional nudges over repeated consumption
Knowledge integration for holistic design rules

More research: Sensory and metabolic drivers of eating behaviour

More research: Disease aetiology and prevention

Project leader / Supervisor dr. G (Gerry) Jager

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Project leader / Supervisor prof.dr.ir. C (Kees) de Graaf

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Project leader / Supervisor prof.dr.ir. EH (Liesbeth) Zandstra

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Project information

Emotions as nudges: Emotional reinforcement for healthy foods.

Project code:: NWO FCB 057-13-001
Status:: Completed
Start project:: Mar 1, 2014
End project:: Mar 1, 2018

Client(s):: NWO Food, Cognition and Behaviour grant (057-13-001)

Partners

Human Nutrition & Health

Utrecht University, Royal FrieslandCampina, Unilever

NUDGIS

This project is part of the NUDGIS (Novel Understanding of Designs for Good Intervention Strategies in the food environment) project. This project aims to contribute to our understanding of the working mechanisms of nudges by incorporating notions from the priming literature and examining them in context. The program entails four projects, addressing (1) the role of social context and (2) emotions as nudges in lab settings and real life (3) the role of awareness and salience of nudges to examine their impact on autonomy and motivation for healthy food choices, and (4) robustness and long-lasting effectiveness of multi-cue nudges that influence food choice by multiple pathways. As a whole, the program will contribute to our understanding of the working mechanisms of nudges by incorporating notions from the priming literature and examining them in context and will result in the formulation of rules to design effective nudges that help to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

Overall, these four recommendations will be integrated into a final report that describes guidelines and design rules for nudges to be used by the food industry, highlighting their robustness in real-life settings for a prolonged period of time to establish their potential efficacy (i.e., taking into account feasibility, acceptability, potential side effects, and costs).