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

尽管对营养教育的资金和鼓励健康选择的政策有所增加，肥胖率仍在继续上升。这个项目解决的问题是如何让消费者做出更健康的食品选择，而不要求他们努力这样做。找到这个问题的答案可能是减少肥胖流行的关键。该研究利用行为经济学的概念，使健康选择成为突出和容易的选择。这个项目的实地实验提供了一个机会来研究消费者做出的决定与真正的饮食后果。这些研究集中在炸薯条、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，除了促进健康之外，这些干预措施还可以让营利性机构通过提供更少的食物来赚更多的钱，但仍能获得顾客的满意。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。该研究将使用新颖的方法，包括获取客户交易的个人层面数据，调查干预措施，推动人们做出健康的食品选择。该项目包括两个实地研究，都是在一所大型公立大学的餐饮服务运营中进行的。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（利用一种假设的情感机制）和营养/自利动机（利用一种假设的认知机制）在促使大学生减少炸薯条的份量和/或接受矿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人们对食物的满意度。研究人员预测，对甜点的丰富的、详细的（情感上的）描述实际上可以代替甜点的大小，使食客对一小份甜点的满意程度和对大份同样的甜点的满意程度一样，没有了堕落的、情感上的详细描述。这两项研究都将测试“情绪效应”，即让人们吃得更少，同时对更少的食物感到满意。

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.