Nudging green food: The effects of a hedonic cue, menu position, a warm-glow cue, and a descriptive norm

Meat consumption is associated with both public health risks and substantial CO2 emissions. In a large-scale field-experiment, we applied four nudges to the digital menus in 136 hamburger restaurants. The nudges promoted vegetarian food purchases by either (1) changing the menu position of vegetarian food, or aligning vegetarian food with (2) a hedonic, taste-focused nudge, (3) the warm-glow effect, or (4) a descriptive social norm. These nudges were thus aimed to shift salience toward a certain goal or the salience of a specific alternative. Vegetarian food purchases were measured in two datasets analyzing if nudges affected customers\u27 “route” to ordering vegetarian food (29,640 observations), and the total number of vegetarian food sold during the intervention (346,081 observations). Results showed that the position nudge affected customers route to buying vegetarian food. More specifically, making the “green category” more accessible made more customers order through that category. Interestingly, this did not affect the total number of vegetarian sales. However, results indicate that nudges that utilize the salience of goals, in particular hedonic goals, may have an overall positive effect on total vegetarian sales

Learning non-Swedish speech sounds : A study of Swedish students’ pronunciation and ability to learn English phonemes

Previous research has shown that L2 students have difficulties producing and even recognising sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. It has also been concluded that accented speech not only compromises intelligibility but also makes the listener negatively biased towards the speaker. The present study explores how proficient Swedish students are in producing the speech sounds /dʒ/, /j/, /v/, /w/, /ʃ/and /tʃ/, of which /dʒ/, /w/ and /tʃ/do not exist in Swedish. In addition, it explores whether their pronunciation of these sounds improves after a brief pronunciation lesson, if this improvement is lasting and whether they tend to learn the pronunciation of words as separate units or are able to generalise the rules of pronunciation and appropriately apply them. It also investigates whether a difference in the structure of the pronunciation lesson affects the students’ results. The study revealed that the students do have difficulties with correctly producing in particular /tʃ/, /dʒ/ and /j/. More specifically, they tended to confuse /dʒ/ and /j/ whereas many students appeared to have been unaware that /tʃ/ exists and used the /ʃ/-sound instead, which exists in Swedish. After the pronunciation lesson, however, the students significantly improved their pronunciation. This improvement was shown to be lasting and the students were generalising rules rather than learning words as separate units. What the study failed to show was a significant difference in results caused by a difference in the structure of the pronunciation lesson

Unexcused absence from physical education in elementary school. On the role of autonomous motivation and body image factors.

Physical education (PE) is an essential school subject due to its potential to promote well-being and health in all children. Yet, PE stands out among other subjects in terms of truancy. This study is one of the first to examine if unexcused absence from PE is associated with early adolescents' body image and autonomous motivation towards PE. A total of 526 Swedish 6th graders (Mage = 12.28, SD = 0.31) reported the frequency of unexcused absence from PE and answered questions about aesthetic and functional body image, social physique anxiety, and autonomous motivation. Findings showed that unexcused absence from PE was associated with less autonomous motivation and higher social physique anxiety. Participants who had never been absent reported higher functional body image investment and satisfaction. Analyses showed that whereas the aesthetic aspects of body image were associated with decreased autonomous motivation toward PE, functional aspects predicted higher autonomous motivation. The study sheds novel light on the links between absence from PE, body image, and autonomous motivation. As absence may have real-life practical effects for school achievement, health, and well-being, the findings demonstrate the importance of mitigating social physique anxiety and promoting an inclusive and body positive PE context early on