Don't Wait for Governments to Nudge You Healthy

In my Don’t Rest in Peace book and in two previous blog posts (Healthy As an Olympian and Healthful Environments: Where Are You and Who Are You With?) I have referred to nudging which generally refers to efforts by authority persons, such as government officials, to surreptitiously or to overtly manipulate you into doing what the authority believes is "best" for you.  For instance, the United States tries to force its citizens to buy health care by exacting a financial penalty on those who fail to do so.

Because governments world-wide are trying to manipulate their citizenry to become healthier, they are encouraging psychologists to conduct research and to develop models that can be employed to facilitate that nudging toward health.  I thought you might want to know what the governments are learning so that you can nudge yourself and resist “Big Brother’s” unwanted nudges.  I will be providing more information over time but let’s start with the insights gained by the work of Laura N. van der Laan (2016) and her co-investigators.

The van der Laan group set out to discover the means by which food choice can be primed, meaning how exposure to an earlier food-related stimulus predisposes us to respond to a later food situation or food stimulus.  For instance, if before dinner a friend tells you that your host frequently overcooks her food, you are more likely to judge the meal accordingly.

The study in question sought to identify the primes that can lead us to select healthful over nonhealthful foods.  And the modality that they scrutinized was vision - how our visual attention and visual concentration biases us toward some foods and away from others.

One hundred and twenty-five participants were exposed to a simulated online situation wherein they shopped for groceries during a two day period.  Twenty-four screens were shown, each containing six items.  Eighteen of the screens had conventional meal (e.g., bread) and snack (e.g., chips) foods, three foods which had high energy content and three which had low.  The experimenters primed one of their groups with a health and dieting goal, a second group with a non-health relevant prime, and a third group with no prime at all.  The participants’ eye movements were tracked to determine the focus of their visual attention.  As expected, persons primed with healthful messages spent more time visually attending to health-supportive foods and they chose more low-calorie nutritious foods over high calorie non-nutritious foods.

The van der Laan results no doubt will be used to justify more governmental nudging into your dietary choices.  And I presume that their hearts will be in the right place, so to speak.  But, as always, I have faith in your good judgement and in your freedom to do what is best for you.  The visual tracking study affirms that we do well to prime ourselves toward health.  Regarding diet, that means that you can increase the likelihood of making healthful decisions by being aware of how you are directing your attention, visual and otherwise.  If you attend and think rarely or shallowly about the quality of your diet and if you make impulsive food choices, your health will reflect those inclinations.  Conversely, if you attend and think often and deeply about quality eating, you will be priming healthful eating.  And the timing of the primes is important.  Try to the think about the foods that you want to eat just before you go to a restaurant or supermarket and just before you select  your meal.  Make sure the healthful ideas are fresh in your mind so that you are intellectually and emotionally ready to translate your good intentions into your good actions.

Reference:

van der Laan, L.,  Papies, E.,  Hooge, I., &  Smeets, P. (2016).  Goal-Directed Visual Attention Drives Health Goal Priming: An Eye-Tracking Experiment.  Health Psychology, September 15, No Pagination Specified.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000410.