Stop Unhealthy Behavior By Making It Uncool

Public health campaigns intended to reduce unhealthy behaviors like binge drinking and eating junk food often focus on the risks of those behaviorsb but a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests a relatively simple but surprisingly effective strategy to improve consumer health based on common sense: like the risky behavior with an 'out' group. Authors Jonah Berger from the University of Pennsylvania and Lindsay Rand from Stanford University found that linking a risky behavior with a group that the targeted audience doesn't want to be associated with caused participants to reduce unhealthy behaviors. The studies began by identifying groups of people who study participants liked, but with whom the participants would not want to be confused — "outgroups." In the first study, the participants were undergraduates and the "outgroup" was graduate students. When participants were led to believe that graduate students consumed more junk food, they chose 28% fewer junk-food items than participants who thought their group ate more junk food. Read More...

Read the whole article on Scientific Blogging

More from Scientific Blogging

Related