Effects of Statistical and Narrative Health Claims on Consumer Food Product Evaluation

"Expert persuasion" can decrease willingness to pay for sugar-containing food

Recent studies have revealed types of eating nudges that can steer consumers toward choosing healthier options. However, most of the previously studied interventions target individual decisions and are not directed to changing consumers’ underlying perception of unhealthy food. Here, we investigate how a healthy eating call—first-person narrative by a health expert—affects individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for sugar-free and sugar-containing food products. Participants performed two blocks of a bidding task, in which they had to bid on sweets labeled either as “sugar- free” or as “sugar-containing.” In-between the two blocks, half of the participants listened to a narrative by a dietary specialist emphasizing the health risks of sugar consumption, whereas the remaining participants listened to a control narrative irrelevant to food choices. We demonstrate that the health expert’s narrative decreased individuals’ WTP for sugar-containing food, but did not modulate their WTP for sugar- free food. Overall, our findings confirm that consumers may conform to healthy eating calls by rather devaluating unhealthy food products than by increasing the value of healthy ones. This paves the way for an avenue of innovative marketing strategies to support individuals in their food choices.

Impact of Induced Moods, Sensation Seeking, and Emotional Contagion on Economic Decisions Under Risk

In addition to probabilities of monetary gains and losses, personality traits, socio-economic factors, and specific contexts such as emotions and framing influence financial risk taking. Here, we investigated the effects of joyful, neutral, and sad mood states on participants' risk-taking behaviour in a simple task with safe and risky options. We also analysed the effect of framing on risk taking. In different trials, a safe option was framed in terms of either financial gains or losses. Moreover, we investigated the effects of emotional contagion and sensation-seeking personality traits on risk taking in this task. We did not observe a significant effect of induced moods on risk taking. Sad mood resulted in a slight non-significant trend of risk aversion compared to a neutral mood. Our results partially replicate previous findings regarding the presence of the framing effect. As a novel finding, we observed that participants with a low emotional contagion score demonstrated increased risk aversion during a sad mood and a similar trend at the edge of significance was present in high sensation seekers. Overall, our results highlight the importance of taking into account personality traits of experimental participants in financial risk-taking studies.