Inform­ing con­sumers of the calorific value of their food options doesn’t change their ordering/eating habits (pre­vi­ously), but remov­ing bar­ri­ers and mak­ing the health­ier options easy to order does.

That’s the con­clu­sion from Kevin Volpp’s lec­ture, ‘Using Behav­ioral Eco­nom­ics to Improve Health Behav­iors’.

Recent stud­ies […] have indi­cated that pro­vid­ing nutri­tional infor­ma­tion at restau­rants and rec­om­mend­ing a calo­rie intake have shown to be inef­fec­tive at reduc­ing con­sump­tion. How­ever, incen­tiviz­ing con­ve­nience of order­ing low calo­rie food, by clus­ter­ing these options together at the top of the menu, seems to have a sig­nif­i­cant impact. This indi­cates that tra­di­tional mea­sures of infor­ma­tional pro­vi­sion are not always suf­fi­cient to moti­vate changes in unhealthy behavior.

And on remov­ing seem­ingly incon­se­quen­tial bar­ri­ers to action:

One cafe­te­ria tested [how much effort peo­ple will go to to eat ice cream] by leav­ing the lid of an ice cream cooler closed on some days and open on other days.

The ice cream cooler was in the exact same loca­tion, and peo­ple could always see the ice cream.  All that var­ied was whether they had to go through the effort of open­ing the lid in order to get it.  Even that was too much work for many peo­ple.  If the lid was closed, only 14% of the din­ers decided it was worth the mod­est effort to open it.  If the lid was open, 30% decided it was ice cream time.

Bar­ri­ers and incen­tives are more pow­er­ful than good inten­tions. Kevin Volpp’s three big questions:

  • Are there built-in default ben­e­fits to be had?
  • In what ways can we make infor­ma­tion pro­vi­sion more precise?
  • How can we shape incen­tives to get peo­ple to behave in a [desired] manner?

via Nudge (1, 2)