Portraying Humans as Machines to Promote Health: Unintended Risks, Mechanisms, and Solutions.

To fight obesity and educate consumers on how the human body functions, health education and marketing materials often highlight the importance of adopting a cognitive approach to food. One strategy employed to promote this approach is to portray humans as machines. Five studies (and three replication and follow-up studies) using different human-as-machine stimuli (internal body composition, face, appearance, and physical movement) revealed divergent effects of human-as-machine representations. While these stimuli promoted healthier choices among consumers who were high in eating self-efficacy, they backfired among consumers who were low in eating self-efficacy (measured in Studies 1 and 3–5; manipulated in Study 2). This reversal happened because portraying humans as machines activated consumers' expectation of adopting a cognitive, machine-like approach to food (Studies 3 and 4)—an expectation that was too difficult to meet for those with low (vs. high) eating self-efficacy. We tested a solution to accompany human-as-machine stimuli in the field (Study 5): we externally enhanced how easy and doable it was for consumers low in eating self-efficacy to adopt a cognitive approach to food, which effectively attenuated the backfire effect on their lunch choices at a cafeteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of Journal of Marketing is the property of American Marketing Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)