Hide the Cookie Jar: Nudging Towards Healthy Eating, with Deniz Ozabaci
Abstract
College students gain considerable weight by consuming unhealthy food. Many universities enter into costly programs to alleviate this problem. We study the effect of a simple, inexpensive option: move unhealthy items out of sight. The opportunity to do this comes from a natural experiment that led a dining hall in the University of New Hampshire to re-locate cookies from a main section in plain sight to a corner away from everyone’s way. The cost of cookies did not change, since the dining hall operates as an “all that you can eat” restaurant. Relative to pizza, a product that did not change location, the consumption of cookies dropped by up to 18% due to the re-location, with stronger effects in lunch and weekdays. We see this as evidence that simple changes in design can nudge students towards healthy eating.
[paper] [Appendix] [Video showing cookie placement]
College students gain considerable weight by consuming unhealthy food. Many universities enter into costly programs to alleviate this problem. We study the effect of a simple, inexpensive option: move unhealthy items out of sight. The opportunity to do this comes from a natural experiment that led a dining hall in the University of New Hampshire to re-locate cookies from a main section in plain sight to a corner away from everyone’s way. The cost of cookies did not change, since the dining hall operates as an “all that you can eat” restaurant. Relative to pizza, a product that did not change location, the consumption of cookies dropped by up to 18% due to the re-location, with stronger effects in lunch and weekdays. We see this as evidence that simple changes in design can nudge students towards healthy eating.
[paper] [Appendix] [Video showing cookie placement]