Nudging Healthy Food and Sustainable Choices

Reducing overweight and the overuse of natural resources are two of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. The roots of those challenges lie in, amongst other things, our everyday behavior such as the food and electricity products we choose. Although there are attempts to address these challenges, such as information campaigns, these traditional interventions have been ineffective in changing behavior. In recent years, however, the nudge approach has shown that interventions that use so-called “irrelevant factors” (e.g., defaults) have the potential to promote healthy eating and environmentally friendly behavior. This dissertation describes the results of three published manuscripts that investigate different nudges (i.e., frames, defaults, set size, position effects) and the additional factors (e.g., preference, weighting of aspects) that influence their effectiveness in changing behavior in the two targeted fields. The results indicate that nudges can be effective, but they also show the complexity of the interaction of the variables. For example, one manuscript indicates that the preference for a cuisine style mediates whether a center-stage effect (i.e., that we tend to choose a dish in the middle of a menu) occurs or not. Those additional factors have so far barely been investigated or brought into a consistent theory. The dissertation thereby contributes to a theoretical understanding of the studied nudges and discusses current and future challenges such as the lack of theory, freedom of choice and hedonic consequences of the nudge approach.