Jaideep and Sengupta Rongrong Zhou
Executive Summary
During the past 20 years, obesity problems have risen significantly. The results from the 1999–2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey indicate that approximately 65% of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese. Apart from lack of physical inactivity, unhealthy dietary habit is the primary cause of such problems. Some people seem particularly unable to resist temptation when faced with hedonically appealing yet unhealthful food options; the authors term such people "eating impulsives."
It is important to gain an understanding of why such people are particularly likely to succumb to food-related temptations and how such impulsive behavior might be corrected. The current research addresses these issues by drawing together different strands of research on impulsive consumption, goal activation, and regulatory focus. Specifically, the authors argue that the tendency of eating impulsives (versus nonimpulsives) to consume a hedonic but unhealthful food is driven by a promotion focus that is spontaneously activated by the tempting food (Experiment 1). In turn, this translates into an emphasis on the potential upsides of consuming the food and a focus on ideal attributes (e.g., great taste) and a suppression of the potential downsides and ought attributes (e.g., health consequences), thus leading impulsives to choose the hedonically appealing food (e.g., chocolate cake) rather than a more healthful but less tempting option (e.g., a vegetable salad; Experiment 2). The authors also show that when the evoked promotion focus is activated, it can influence the choice behavior of impulsive eaters in completely unrelated domains, such as investment options and product alternatives (Experiments 3a and 3b). For example, the authors find that mere exposure to a tempting food (chocolate cake) makes impulsives more likely to invest in high-risk/high-reward financial options; such an effect is not observed for nonimpulsives.
In addition to examining the choice behaviors exhibited by impulsives on exposure to a tempting food, the current research also builds on the identified theoretical mechanism to propose ways of correcting impulsive behavior. In particular, the authors find that inducing a prevention focus at the time of choice can help reduce the tendency of eating impulsives to choose a hedonic snack over a healthful one (Experiment 4). Furthermore, they show that even if a hedonic choice is made initially, inducing a prevention focus postchoice can decrease the level of satisfaction with that choice (Experiment 5), thus providing a first step toward correcting the impulsive behavior in the future. The findings add to the various self-control strategies that have been identified in prior literature, such as self-distracting, substitution, and reframing the tempting stimulus in a less tempting manner. These results are useful from a public policy perspective as well, in that they provide some guidelines as to how impulsive eating behavior might be combated in natural settings.
The regulatory focus–based mechanism identified as a driver of impulsive behavior can fruitfully be used in other contexts as well. For example, recent work on cultural differences in impulsive consumption has found that the relationship between chronic impulsiveness and actual impulse buying is stronger for people from individualist cultures (e.g., Americans) than for people from collectivist cultures (e.g., East Asians); in other words, the former group is more likely to yield to their impulses than the latter (Kacen and Lee 2002). When allied with another strand of research that has found that Americans tend to be more promotion-focused than East Asians (Lee, Aaker, and Gardener 2000), these findings can be interpreted using the mechanism identified herein: Namely, the stronger relationship between impulsivity and actual impulse buying for Americans might be at least partly due to a greater promotion focus being activated for this group on exposure to the tempting object than is the case for East Asians.
Biography
Jaideep Sengupta is Associate Professor in Marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received a PhD in Management from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology (Calcutta), and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras). Professor Sengupta's research interests lie in the area of consumer information processing. His prior work has appeared in several leading journals, including Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. Professor Sengupta is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Rongrong Zhou is Assistant Professor in Marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She received a BS in Management Information System from Fudan University, China, and a PhD in Marketing from Columbia University. Professor Zhou's research interests lie in the area of consumer decision making. Her work has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, May 2007
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