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Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices

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 towa...

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Autores principales: van den Enden, Gitta, Geyskens, Kelly
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8568290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34735536
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259521
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author van den Enden, Gitta
Geyskens, Kelly
author_facet van den Enden, Gitta
Geyskens, Kelly
author_sort van den Enden, Gitta
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-85682902021-11-05 Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices van den Enden, Gitta Geyskens, Kelly PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2021-11-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8568290/ /pubmed/34735536 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259521 Text en © 2021 van den Enden, Geyskens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
van den Enden, Gitta
Geyskens, Kelly
Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title_full Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title_fullStr Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title_full_unstemmed Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title_short Attract the best: The attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
title_sort attract the best: the attraction effect as an effective strategy to enhance healthy choices
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8568290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34735536
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259521
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