Researchers explain how a so-called halo effect tricks people into buying them

Apr 3, 2013 08:59 GMT  ·  By

Experiments carried out by a team of scientists working with the Cornell University in New York State have recently shown that organic foods are more often than not bought by consumers because of a so-called health halo effect.

More precisely, it is being said that most shoppers tend to overestimate the health benefits of their buying and eating/drinking organic products, hence their willingness to pay significant amounts of money for them.

The experiments carried out by these researchers revolved around asking a total of 115 volunteers, both males and females, to taste and rate two allegedly different samples of biscuits, crisps and yogurt.

Despite the fact that all of the foods used in these experiments were organic, the researchers chose to label only some of them accordingly.

Following their tasting said foods, the volunteers displayed a clear preference (at least as far as health benefits were concerned) for the ones labeled as organic, and automatically assumed that they were more nutritious than the others.

According to News, the consumers who agreed to take part in this study also worked on the assumption that the foods they believed to be organic had fewer calories than the ones presumed to be non-organic.

Interestingly enough, the volunteers labeled the so-called non-organic biscuits as being more tasty than the organic ones, thus proving that most shoppers work on the assumption that organic foods need necessarily taste worse than non-organic ones.

By the looks of it, almost all consumers are ready and willing to pay up to 25% more for foods they consider to be beneficial to their health, despite the fact that few of them ever bother to read the label and check to see exactly how nutritious such products are.

The Cornell University researchers warn that, because shoppers tend to overestimate organic foods in this manner, some of them might end up both spending a tad too much money on them and overeating on account of their underestimating the calorie counts of such products.