Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Eating with your Heart on your Fork: The role of affective processes in nudging dietary behavior.

尽管营养教育和鼓励健康选择的政策资金增加，但肥胖率继续上升。该项目解决了如何让消费者做出更健康的食物选择而不要求他们努力这样做的问题。 找到这个问题的答案可能是减少肥胖流行的关键。拟议的研究利用行为经济学的概念，使健康的选择突出和容易的选择。在这个项目中的实地实验提供了一个机会，研究客户作出决定与真实的饮食后果。这些研究集中在薯条、苏打水和甜点的消费上。研究结果可以外推到其他食物，并应用于鼓励或阻止各种饮食选择。从经济的角度来看，除了促进健康外，这些干预措施还可以使营利性机构通过提供更小份额的食品来赚取更多的钱，但仍然可以获得客户满意度。 这个项目的目的是研究心理过程（情感与认知）在食物选择中的作用。 使用新的方法，包括获取个人层面的客户交易数据，该研究将调查干预措施，以推动人们做出健康的食物选择。该项目涉及两项实地研究，均在一所大型公立大学的餐饮服务业务范围内进行。这两项研究的重点是通过吸引情感（情感处理）或非情感（认知）动机来减少放纵食物的份量。第一项研究的目的是比较慈善/亲社会动机（利用假设的情感机制）和营养/自我利益动机（利用假设的认知机制）在推动大学生减少薯条份量和/或接受喷泉水而不是苏打水方面的有效性。第二项研究的目的是检验操纵菜单描述是否会影响对食物消费的满意度。 研究人员预测，对甜点的感官丰富，详细（情感）描述实际上可以替代甜点的大小，使食客对小部分甜点的满意度与他们对大部分相同甜点的满意度一样，没有颓废，情感详细的描述。 这两项研究都将测试“情绪效应”，即让人们吃得更少，同时感到道德和满足。

Obesity rates continue to rise, despite increased funding for nutrition education and policies to encourage healthy choices. This project addresses the question of how to get consumers to make healthier food choices without asking them to work hard to do so. Finding answers to this question may be the key to reducing the obesity epidemic. The proposed research harnesses concepts from behavioral economics to make the healthy option the salient and easy choice. The filed experiments in this project offer an opportunity to study customers making decisions with real dietary consequences. The studies focus on consumption of French fries, soda, and desserts. The results can be extrapolated to other foods and applied to encouraging or discouraging a variety of dietary choices. From an economic standpoint, in addition to promoting health, the interventions could allow for-profit establishments to make more money by offering a smaller portion of a food item but still garner customer satisfaction. The objective of this project is to examine the role psychological processes (affective versus cognitive) play in making food choices. Using novel methodologies that include acquiring individual level data on customer transactions, the research will investigate interventions to nudge people toward making healthy food choices. The project entails two field studies, both to be conducted within the foodservice operation of a large public university. The two studies focus on manipulations to decrease portion sizes of indulgent foods by appealing to emotional (affective processing) or non-emotional (cognitive) motives. The aim of the first study is to compare a charity/pro-social motive (tapping a hypothesized emotional mechanism) to a nutrition/self-interest motive (tapping a hypothesized cognitive mechanism) in their effectiveness in nudging college students to downsize their French fry portion and/or accept fountain water instead of soda. The aim of the second study is to examine whether manipulating menu descriptions can impact satisfaction with food consumed. The researchers predict that a sensory-rich, detailed (emotional) description of a dessert can, in effect, substitute for size of the dessert, making diners just as satisfied with a small portion of dessert as they would with a larger portion of the same dessert, absent the decadent, emotionally-detailed description. Both studies will test the "emotion effect" in getting individuals to eat less while feeling virtuous and satisfied with smaller portions.