Opportunities and Barriers for Smaller Portions in Food Service: Lessons from Marketing and Behavioral Economics

This paper uses the frameworks and evidence from marketing and behavioral economics to highlight the opportunities and barriers for portion control in food service environments. Applying Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast and slow’ concepts, it describes 10 strategies that can be effective in ‘tricking’ the consumer’s fast cognitive system to make better decisions and in triggering the slow cognitive system to help prevent the fast system from making bad decisions. These strategies include shrinking defaults, elongating packages, increasing the visibility of small portions, offering more mixed virtue options, adding more small sizes, offering ‘right-sized’ standard portions, using meaningful size labels, adopting linear pricing, using temporal landmarks to push smaller portions and facilitating pre-commitment. For each of these strategies, I discuss the specific cost and revenue barriers that a food service operator would face if the strategy were adopted

Behavioral Economics and the Psychology of Fruit and Vegetable Consumption

Behavioral economics is an emerging paradigm that challenges the assumptions and predictions of classical economics. This new paradigm emphasizes that consumers do not always make optimal use of available information nor do they always make choices and tradeoffs in a manner that optimizes their well-being. After describing some basic concepts in behavioral economics, this paper reviews the growing literature that applies these concepts to the consumption of fruits and vegetables. A toolkit to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables is developed based on an analysis of previous research. Three general kinds of tools are described: tools for 1) displays and settings, 2) incentives and prices, and 3) planning and habits

Living, and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life

Introduction It is a common assumption of everyday conversation that people can provide accurate answers to questions about their feelings, both past (e.g. \u27How was your vacation?\u27) and current (e.g. \u27Does this hurt?\u27). Although the distinction is mostly ignored, the two kinds of questions are vastly different. Introspective evaluations of past episodes depend on two achievements that are not required for reports of immediate experience: accurate retrieval of feelings and reasonable integration of experiences that are spread over time. The starting point for this chapter is that the retrieval and the temporal integration of emotional experiences are both prone to error, and that retrospective evaluations are therefore less authoritative than reports of current feelings. We first consider the dichotomy between introspection and retrospection from several perspectives, before discussing its implications for a particular question: how would we determine who is happier, the French or the Americans

The Neuroscience of Preferences

The expression of preference reflects the influence of two broad modes of judgment—intuition and deliberation (Kahneman and Frederick 2002). The intuitive mode includes emotional reactions (e.g. Loewenstein 1996), but it also includes heuristic process which are largely perceptual or cognitive in nature. Intuitive processes occur early in a judgment process; they are fast and largely automatic. This is in contrast with deliberative processes which tend to occur later in a judgement process, are slower, and are more controlled. Intuitive and deliberative processes interact with each other, although they are often in conflict, and there is some evidence that they are anatomically separated in the brain

Put Your Imperfections Behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings

People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explored occasions when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain dates are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We present causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark denoting the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self

Traffic-Light Labels and Choice Architecture: Promoting Healthy Food Choices

Background: Preventing obesity requires maintenance of healthy eating behaviors over time. Food labels and strategies that increase visibility and convenience of healthy foods (choice architecture) promote healthier choices, but long-term effectiveness is unknown. Purpose: Assess effectiveness of traffic-light labeling and choice architecture cafeteria intervention over 24 months. Design: Longitudinal pre–post cohort follow-up study between December 2009 and February 2012. Data were analyzed in 2012. Setting/participants: Large hospital cafeteria with a mean of 6511 transactions daily. Cafeteria sales were analyzed for (1) all cafeteria customers and (2) a longitudinal cohort of 2285 hospital employees who used the cafeteria regularly. Intervention: After a 3-month baseline period, cafeteria items were labeled green (healthy); yellow (less healthy); or red (unhealthy) and rearranged to make healthy items more accessible. Main outcome measures: Proportion of cafeteria sales that were green or red during each 3-month period from baseline to 24 months. Changes in 12- and 24-month sales were compared to baseline for all transactions and transactions by the employee cohort. Results: The proportion of sales of red items decreased from 24% at baseline to 20% at 24 months (p\u3c0.001), and green sales increased from 41% to 46% (p\u3c0.001). Red beverages decreased from 26% of beverage sales at baseline to 17% at 24 months (p\u3c0.001); green beverages increased from 52% to 60% (p\u3c0.001). Similar patterns were observed for the cohort of employees, with the largest change for red beverages (23%–14%, p\u3c0.001). Conclusions: A traffic-light and choice architecture cafeteria intervention resulted in sustained healthier choices over 2 years, suggesting that food environment interventions can promote long-term changes in population eating behaviors

Functional Imaging of Decision Conflict

Decision conflict occurs when people feel uncertain as to which option to choose from a set of similarly attractive (or unattractive) options, with many studies demonstrating that this conflict can lead to suboptimal decision making. In this article, we investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of decision conflict, in particular, the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Previous studies have implicated the ACC in conflict monitoring during perceptual tasks, but there is considerable controversy as to whether the ACC actually indexes conflict related to choice, or merely conflict related to selection of competing motor responses. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we dissociate the decision and response phases of a decision task, and show that the ACC does indeed index conflict at the decision stage. Furthermore, we sho that it does so for a complex decision task, one that requires the integration of beliefs and preferences and not just perceptual judgments

It Must be Awful for Them: Perspective and Task Context Affects Ratings for Health Conditions

When survey respondents rate the quality of life (QoL) associated with a health condition, they must not only evaluate the health condition itself, but must also interpret the meaning of the rating scale in order to assign a specific value. The way that respondents approach this task depends on subjective interpretations, resulting in inconsistent results across populations and tasks. In particular, patients and non-patients often give very different ratings to health conditions, a discrepancy that raises questions about the objectivity of either groups\u27 evaluations. In this study, we found that the perspective of the raters (i.e., their own current health relative to the health conditions they rated) influences the way they distinguish between different health states that vary in severity. Consistent with prospect theory, a mild and a severe lung disease scenario were rated quite differently by lung disease patients whose own health falls between the two scenarios, whereas healthy non-patients, whose own health was better than both scenarios, rated the two scenarios as much more similar. In addition, we found that the context of the rating task influences the way participants distinguish between mild and severe scenarios. Both patients and non-patients gave less distinct ratings to the two scenarios when each were presented in isolation than when they were presented alongside other scenarios that provided contextual information about the possible range of severity for lung disease. These results raise continuing concerns about the reliability and validity of subjective QoL ratings, as these ratings are highly sensitive to differences between respondent groups and the particulars of the rating task

Oral microbial communities in children, caregivers, and associations with salivary biomeasures and environmental tobacco smoke exposure

Human oral microbial communities are diverse, with implications for oral and systemic health. Oral microbial communities change over time; thus, it is important to understand how healthy versus dysbiotic oral microbiomes differ, especially within and between families. There is also a need to understand how the oral microbiome composition is changed within an individual including by factors such as environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure, metabolic regulation, inflammation, and antioxidant potential. Using archived saliva samples collected from caregivers and children during a 90-month follow-up assessment in a longitudinal study of child development in the context of rural poverty, we used 16S rRNA gene sequencing to determine the salivary microbiome. A total of 724 saliva samples were available, 448 of which were from caregiver/child dyads, an additional 70 from children and 206 from adults. We compared children’s and caregivers’ oral microbiomes, performed “stomatotype” analyses, and examined microbial relations with concentrations of salivary markers associated with ETS exposure, metabolic regulation, inflammation, and antioxidant potential (i.e., salivary cotinine, adiponectin, C-reactive protein, and uric acid) assayed from the same biospecimens. Our results indicate that children and caregivers share much of their oral microbiome diversity, but there are distinct differences. Microbiomes from intrafamily individuals are more similar than microbiomes from nonfamily individuals, with child/caregiver dyad explaining 52% of overall microbial variation. Notably, children harbor fewer potential pathogens than caregivers, and participants’ microbiomes clustered into two groups, with major differences being driven by Streptococcus spp. Differences in salivary microbiome composition associated with ETS exposure, and taxa associated with salivary analytes representing potential associations between antioxidant potential, metabolic regulation, and the oral microbiome