Public health messages are clear when it comes to reducing sugar intake, with the World Health Organisation warning that the primary source of excess sugar consumption is sugar-sweetened beverages.
While there are many strategies to influence positive consumer choices, a new study has found that subtly putting healthy drink choices on Instagram isn’t an effective way to influence positive habits.
Psychology researchers at Flinders University developed two behavioural experiments to investigate the potential benefits of deploying images, containing water or soft drinks, in non-drink-related Instagram-style advertising images.
“The experiments investigated whether subtly incorporating beverages into Instagram images could nudge choices from a vending machine-style visual display.
“In both experiments, glasses of water or cola, or no beverages were incorporated into a series of Instagram-style advertising images,” says lead researcher and PhD candidate Enola Kay in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work.
More obvious approaches may be better
Nudging is a term, which refers to a range of subtle and unobtrusive tools to gently guide behaviour, which are designed to work relatively unconsciously and aim to make the desired option the easiest or default choice.
“For example, placing healthy foods at checkout counters or rearranging … shelves to make healthier foods more prominent have been found to increase healthy food purchases in some studies,” says Ms Kay.
“The unhealthy options remain available, but the healthier options are more obvious and easier to access, therefore being more likely to be chosen.”
The researchers found that placing healthy drink images into the background of Instagram photos is not an effective way to nudge positive consumption behaviours.
However, when they made the drinks clearer and a little more obvious, they found that incorporating soft drink images into the background of Instagram images can nudge drink choices over food choices but incorporating healthy water images still had little effect.
“The results of the studies show that incorporating drink primes into the background of Instagram-style images can be an effective means of nudging the choice of a drink over food from a visual display” but in the context of previous research, “nudging healthier drink choices appears to be more challenging than nudging healthier food consumption behaviours. Finding an effective means of encouraging healthier drink choices is important considering the adverse health consequences associated with consumption of sugary beverages.”
More obvious approaches may instead be needed to overcome the habitual nature of our choices as a result.
“Food and drink choices are clearly habitual in nature, with participants in both experiments more likely to choose something they regularly consume and like. So, nudging healthier drink and food choices may be made difficult by the need to override the habitual nature of dietary choices,” says Ms Kay.
“In addition, unhealthy foods and drinks are much more available and frequently advertised than healthier alternatives, which consequently are less familiar to consumers.”
To read the study, visit: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666322004287?via%3Dihub
