Nudging by Default or Boosting by Informational Disclosures on Healthy Food Choices: Experimental Comparison in the Context of a Created Online Supermarket App

Abstract

Background

Addressing worldwide obesity constitutes one of the major public health challenges of today. Changes in dietary patterns are urgently needed, and disciplines such as social marketing represent a powerful tool to influence food choice.

Focus of the Article

This article focuses on the behavioural change that occurs when consumers are faced with nudge by defaults or informational boost interventions.

Research Questions

Are default nudging and informational boost interventions effective tools in increasing the number of healthy food choices?.

Importance to the Social Marketing Field

This study expands the knowledge about tools that are under the social marketing domain that could fight against worldwide obesity by contrasting two techniques that, to our knowledge, have not been contrasted previously: nudging by default and increasing information to foster the selection of highly nutritional foods.

Methods

In this study, we experimentally compared two interventions within the framework of this field (N = 108): nudging by default and informational boosting. In the nudge by default intervention, participants were confronted with a pre-established shopping cart composed of ten healthy products, and they had to freely decide whether they wanted the latest cart or to make their own. In the boost intervention, participants received nutritional information about the benefits of choosing healthy products and again could freely change their food selected. An application that simulated an online supermarket with real images from a Spanish store was expressly created for the study: the Decision Market app. Once the three measures (1) “base” (pre-test), (2) “nudge” (post-test a) and (3) “boost” (post-test b) were collected (measures 2 and 3 appeared in a random order), data analyses were performed via repeated measures factorial ANOVA with the number of healthy foods chosen as the dependent variable.

Results

Our results revealed effectiveness in the case of the default intervention but not in the case of the informational boosting condition. Additionally, those participants who prioritised health when purchasing were not influenced by default interventions to the same extent as those who prioritised price or taste.

Recommendations for Research or Practice

Our study contributes to the literature on nudging, and we highlight the potential effects of combining different strategies in the long term to address the obesity epidemic.