14 DAY TRIAL // Most people will not trade the bag of chips they have in their hand with an apple, even if they know that a fruit is far healthier, and this is because of the effect that unhealthy snacks have on their unconscious, concluded a new study carried out by Wageningen consumer researchers.
People get very easily attached to things they have received, so the researchers from the Economics of Consumers and Households Group in Wageningen wanted to find out if this behavior also applied to food, and whether there were differences in attachment between healthy and unhealthy snacks.
Their experiment consisted in distributing healthy and unhealthy snacks in almost forty schools, over a two-year period.
In every class, half the students received fruits while the other half received a bag of chips or a Mars bar.
Afterwards, the students were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the product, so that they would develop an attachment towards it, and finally, they were asked to switch their items.
As expected, the students with an unhealthy snack were less willing to exchange for an apple or an orange.
Furthermore, if the students were allowed to choose a snack for themselves, sixty percent chose a Mars bar or a bag of chips.
This confirms the experts' belief that people consider the things they possess to be more important and more valuable than the products they do not yet have.
For example, if they could sell a coffee mug that was given to them, they would sell it twice the price they paid for it.
But aside from the preference for the things people own, researcher Leonie Cramer says that the attachment for unhealthy snacks is bigger than the attachment for healthy ones.
“Apparently, all sorts of unconscious emotional processes are at play in a big way,” so it's very important to consider this attachment effect, in order to stimulate a healthy food choice.
“Canteens should, for example, try to offer a standard healthy menu or a standard healthy snack, so that the choice for the consumer is easy and healthy at the same time.”
This research was published in this month's Food Quality and Preference magazine.