We all like to think that we make important life decisions, like what to eat, consciously and rationally, but if that were the case, we wouldn’t be in the midst of an obesity epidemic.
The opening words of the Institute of Medicine’s report on the potential threat posed by food advertising were: “Marketing plays.” Certainly, there are is I could go over with you a “huge number of well-conducted randomized experiments” that “have shown that exposure to marketing, especially but not only advertising, changes people’s eating behavior. Marketing makes people choose to eat more.” But what do you need to know beyond the fact that the industry spend Tens of billions of dollars a year on this? Do you think Coca-Cola would spend one cent more than it thinks it should spend to get people to drink its brown sugar water? It’s like when my medical colleagues accept “medicated lunches” from pharmaceutical reps and get offended when I suggest it might affect their prescribing practices. Do you really think drug companies are in the business of giving away free money for nothing? They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.
To give you an idea of the insidious nature of marketing, let me share an interesting research article published in the world’s leading scientific journal: “In-Store Music It affects The book “Product Choice” documented an experiment in which either French accordion music or German Bierkeller music was played on alternating days in the wine section of a grocery store. As you can see below and at 1:27 in my video The role of food advertising in the obesity epidemicin the days of French music juice At the bottom, people were three times more likely to buy French wine, and on German music days, shoppers were about three times more likely to buy German wine. And it wasn’t just a difference of a few percent; it was a total threefold investment. Despite the dramatic effect, when shoppers were contacted afterwards, the vast majority of them denied that music had influenced their choice.
Most of our everyday behavior doesn’t seem to be… dictation Through careful and thoughtful deliberations, though we would like to think so. Instead, we tend to make more automatic and impulsive decisions, triggered by unconscious cues or habitual patterns, especially when we are “stressed, tired or worried. It is estimated that this unconscious part of our brain is at work and guiding our behaviors at least 95% of the time.” This is the area where marketing manipulations do most of their dirty work.
The part of our brain that governs consciousness may only be able to process about 50 bits of information per second, roughly equivalent to a short tweet. On the other hand, our total cognitive capacity is estimated to process more than 10 million bits per second. Because we are only able to deliberately process a limited amount of information at a time, if we are distracted or otherwise unable to concentrate, our decisions may become even more impulsive. An elegant example of this “cognitive overload” effect was provided from an experiment that included fruit salad and chocolate cake.
Before calls could be made with the touch of a button or the sound of our voice, the seven-digit span of telephone numbers in the United States was based In part, this is the longest sequence most people can recall on the fly. We seem to be able to hold only about seven chunks of information (give or take two) in our immediate short-term memory. The study’s rationale: Randomize People are asked to memorize either a seven-digit number or a two-digit number that will be remembered in another room down the hall. On the way, offer them the choice of a fruit salad or a piece of chocolate cake. Memorizing a two-digit number is easy and presumably requires few cognitive resources. As you can see in the graph below and at minute 3:52 of my videoUnder the double-digit condition, most of the study participants elected Fruit salad. Faced with the same choice, most of those trying to keep seven digits in their heads opted for the cake.
This can happen in the real world: empowering The advertising effect. If you have people watch a TV show with ads for unhealthy snacks, it’s no surprise that they’ll eat more unhealthy snacks compared to those who watch non-food ads. Or maybe it is a surprise. We all like to think that we’re in control and not that easily manipulated. However, the funny thing is that we can be even more susceptible the less attention we pay. If you randomly give people the same two-digit or seven-digit memorization task during the TV show, the snack attack effect was magnified among those who were more worried. How many of us have the TV on in the background or multitask during commercial breaks? Research suggests that may make us even more susceptible to subversion of our better judgment.
There is an irony in all this. Calls for restrictions on marketing are often resisted by invoking the banner of freedom. What does that mean in this context, when research shows how easily our free choices can be influenced without our conscious control? One senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation went so far as to say: suggest that, given the dire health consequences of our unhealthy eating habits, “marketing techniques we are unaware of should be considered in the same way as invisible carcinogens and toxins in the air and water that can poison us without us realizing it.”
Given the role that marketing can play even when we least suspect it, what is the role of personal responsibility in the obesity epidemic? That is the topic of my next video.
We are finishing this series on obesity, there are three videos left:
If you missed any of the previous videos, check out the related posts below.
