From moving the biscuit tin to the top shelf to filling the fridge with fruit and vegetables and throwing out the takeaway menus, most of us have at some stage tried steps to tackle our unhealthy eating habits.
Dr Felix Why
Now an expert from the University of Worcester will explain how subtle changes to our lives and workplace could be incorporated to influence us psychologically to make the right choices.
Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Dr Felix Why, will give a free talk about the psychological research he has been collaborating on with colleagues from the Universitas Negeri Semarang in Indonesia around so-called ‘nudge behaviour’. The research has been carried out both in Indonesia, where there is a high obesity rate, and in the UK.
“Nudging doesn’t involve banning things,” said Dr Why. “It’s changing the choice architecture to make things easier. It doesn’t involve financial incentives to make it cheaper, it’s not about removing choice. From this talk you will learn that you get exposed to the persuasiveness of nudge, how pervasive it is in society and the varieties of nudging techniques available.”
The session, ‘Nudge Behaviour – Psychological Research Strategies for Healthy Dietary Choices and Behaviour Change’ takes place at The Hive on November 1 at 6.30pm. It will look at some of the techniques used in their research, and in other studies, their success and how this could be used in people’s everyday lives, particularly in the workplace.
Nudge behaviour strategies can be wide ranging, but fall into three types – behavioural, cognitive and emotional. A behavioural example would be making healthy food more convenient, such as fruit slices rather than a whole fruit. Cognitive nudges tap into your thinking, such as ‘one of your five-a-day’ stickers on packaging for fruit or vegetables or using a healthy scent, like fruit, in the place where the choice is being made. Emotional nudging involves associating positive emotions with the behaviour that you want to nudge people to do, for example displaying posters showing people smiling while eating fruits.
Techniques within these include default nudging – making the default option the healthy one so someone has to actively make the choice to have something unhealthy – and positional nudging – placing things in a certain way so that the things you want people to do are easier and less effort than the unhealthier options.
For the past few years, Dr Why and his Indonesian counterparts have been using nudge techniques to see how it alters people’s eating and drinking choices. While many studies have been carried out in the western world, Dr Why said this study aimed to provide a more global perspective on the issue.
He said that humans were able to adapt and get used to new choice or purchasing habits, hence, nudging can be used effectively to enable people to adapt to healthier behaviours, such as having less sugar, which their research had borne out. The problem is, he added, that we are equally adaptable to unhealthy habits.
Tickets must be booked. For more information or to book tickets visit the online booking webpage.