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Junk Food Mind Control
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/03/junk-food-mind-control
Junk Food Mind Control
9 March 2014 2:00 pm
Think you’ll always pick chocolate over a bag of chips? Don’t be so sure. Researchers have found that if they can get people to pay more attention to a particular type of junk food, they will begin to prefer it—even weeks or months after the experiment. The finding suggests a new way to manipulate our decisions and perhaps even encourage us to pick healthy foods.
“This paper is provocative and very well done,” says Antonio Rangel, a neuroeconomist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the new study. “It is exciting because it’s a proof of concept that a relatively simple intervention can have this long-lasting effect.”
Economists who study decision-making had previously found that, when deciding between multiple items, people tend to let their gaze linger on the things that they end up choosing. This observation has motivated companies to pursue flashy packaging to attract consumers’ eyes. Tom Schonberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, wondered whether people’s preferences could be changed before being faced with such a decision by training their brains to pay more attention to certain items.
<snip>
When the researchers brought the subjects back as much as 2 months later, they found that the altered preferences remained: Subjects were still more likely to choose an item that had been associated with the tone during training. “The novelty here is that, without any external rewards or incentives, we’ve managed to influence people’s values and choices over a long time period,” Schonberg says.
<snip>
Junk Food Mind Control
9 March 2014 2:00 pm
Think you’ll always pick chocolate over a bag of chips? Don’t be so sure. Researchers have found that if they can get people to pay more attention to a particular type of junk food, they will begin to prefer it—even weeks or months after the experiment. The finding suggests a new way to manipulate our decisions and perhaps even encourage us to pick healthy foods.
“This paper is provocative and very well done,” says Antonio Rangel, a neuroeconomist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the new study. “It is exciting because it’s a proof of concept that a relatively simple intervention can have this long-lasting effect.”
Economists who study decision-making had previously found that, when deciding between multiple items, people tend to let their gaze linger on the things that they end up choosing. This observation has motivated companies to pursue flashy packaging to attract consumers’ eyes. Tom Schonberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, wondered whether people’s preferences could be changed before being faced with such a decision by training their brains to pay more attention to certain items.
<snip>
When the researchers brought the subjects back as much as 2 months later, they found that the altered preferences remained: Subjects were still more likely to choose an item that had been associated with the tone during training. “The novelty here is that, without any external rewards or incentives, we’ve managed to influence people’s values and choices over a long time period,” Schonberg says.
<snip>