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Nudge Theory And Food Choice

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The Context:
An unhealthy diet can lead to disease. There is a large body of evidence linking poor diet to overweight and obesity as well as cancer and diabetes. Standard approaches to overweight and obesity reduction have assumed that individuals’ food related behaviour is carried out via rational decision making process ( Just & Payne, 2009) . However, inter-disciplinary research in behavioural theory and food choice indicates that people do not behave in a rational manner, and that environment plays a major role in influencing the choice of a person (Stewart Palmer, 2012). Nudge theory offers a means by which we can attempt to influence the food choice of the individual by making changes in the choice architecture of the offering. I have …show more content…

The authors divided the subjects into two experimental conditions both groups had access to the same set of songs, but in the experimental condition, members could see how many times each song had been downloaded (Ibid.) In this experiment, what participants didn’t know was that researchers had in fact rigged the experiment, making up the download figures for the participants in the experimental condition. They discovered that participants in the experimental condition were nudged into downloading a song because they looked towards how many downloads each song had received in order to make a quick judgement regarding the quality of a song. In light of the above, I wish to implement a form of product liking system in-store for healthy dietary alternatives. Consumer Liking, is an interactive voting display system to be placed under certain healthy products that will allow shoppers to ‘like’ a healthy product. Based on the above research, such a nudge in-store might actually lead to more purchases of a product. I wish to inflate the numbers for the healthy dietary choices and nudge the buyers to use the product.

Experiment
Research Question: Does the customer prefer a healthy dietary alternative when nudged by the display of inflated likes in the voting display …show more content…

Remaining all other factors being same with respect to both the conditions, the increase in the preference in the choice of dietary alternative is attributed to nudge in the form of inflated ‘likes’. The sale of healthy dietary soft drink and its normal variant are the dependent variables and the effect of independent variables (Control Condition or Test Condition) on the dependent variables is studied. The experiment has the construct validly because it tries to measure the sales of healthy dietary softdrink and its normal alternative to make claims about the effectiveness of the nudging intervention. Since, we study the effect of social influence induced by inflated ‘likes’ on the preferences of the customer, the results can be applied to situations outside the context of experiment. Thus, the experiment has external

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