Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Stanford University have published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines how human-as-a-machine representations affect consumers – in particular their eating behavior and health. .
The study, to be published in the Journal of Marketing, is titled ‘Portraying Humans as Machines to Promote Health: Unintended Risks, Mechanisms, and Solutions’ and is authored by Andrea Weihrauch and Szu-Chi Huang. To combat obesity, governments, marketers, and consumer welfare groups often encourage consumers to make food choices more rational.
One strategy is to use human representation as a tool – showing people as tools. This approach seeks to accelerate the connections that people already have about machines – that machines make rational decisions – to help them approach food in a machine-like way. , with the aim of promoting healthier choices.
For example, the National Geographic series “The Incredible Human Machine” describes unhealthy behavior as human “mistakes” in the maintenance of our body machine; Centrum urges consumers to “power the human machine” with healthy food products; and the international event Men’s Health Week compares a person’s body to a car and says that unhealthy food and drink choices (ie, alcohol) are hurting your “engine.”
In addition, users experience human-as-a-machine representations in everyday life: virtual telepresence systems depict people as human faces with mechanical bodies, human augmentation technologies (e.g., augmented reality goggles ) represents humans as more of a device, and artificial intelligence (AI) software becomes further along the line between humans and devices.
When consumers see people represented as machines, they feel that they are expected to behave like machines and choose food as tools – in a rational and quantitative way. This style of making choices is in line with the expectations of policy makers and can lead to desired effects (healthier choices) for some consumers.
However, this expectation goes back for a very vulnerable segment of consumers – consumers who have low confidence in their ability to choose healthy food. For them, human-as-a-machine productions force them to choose unhealthy choices.
Why is this happening?
Weihrauch explains “For this consumer segment, the expectation is that one should be reasonable and like a machine when it comes to food feeling incompetent. Instead of feeling that motivated to be more rational, the feeling that you cannot achieve as a tool gives a healthier impetus.make a choice instead.
Thus, a strategy used in good faith to educate consumers and promote their health can have an unusually dark side, which harms the real area that consumer welfare organizations want to help. “
There is hope, however. Research provides a practical solution to help get around this backfire effect: come along with the human-as-a-tool insights with a message to reassure consumers that similar food choices are possible to make a machine. Putting this message in a cafe, the study found that consumer choice of healthy food had gone up 22% for some.
These results ring a warning bell for nonprofits, policymakers, educators, and for-profit health marketers: the use of human-as-machine images can be more complex than expected as consumers can can be expected to be “machine-like” to be dangerous if it is not to their potential.
Understanding the processes that can cause neutral food choices is also crucial for consumers, especially as human-as-machine stimuli are becoming more common in the lives of consumers throughout the world. the world.