Anirban Mukhopadhyay is a Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at Bayes Business School, City St. George’s, University of London. His research examines the interplay between consumers’ lay beliefs, emotions, and self-regulatory decisions, with substantive interests in health-related decision-making, field experimentation with policy implications, and subjective well-being. He is currently Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Psychology, where has previously served as Editor-in-Chief, Co-Editor, and Area Editor. He has also served as Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing Research, and on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He is a past winner of the Early Career Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology and has been recognized as a Young Scholar and an MSI Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute. He holds a PhD in Marketing from Columbia University, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and a B.Sc. (Hons.) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. His detailed profile can be found here.
Bayes Business School (City, University of London)
November 25, 2024
Effects of Food-Related Lay Beliefs
This talk will cover an ongoing program of research into the effects of laypeople’s beliefs about food. The first part of the talk will focus on beliefs about the causes of obesity. Medical research consensus is that a poor diet is a greater determinant of obesity than lack of exercise. However, we find that only about half of lay people believe that diet is the primary cause of obesity. People who mistakenly underestimate the role of a poor diet, and instead implicate insufficient exercise, have higher body mass indices (“BMI”) and are more likely to be overweight. Across four papers, we study these misperceptions and trace them to “lean washing” by marketers of processed food and beverages, specifically, their lobbying, public relations, and CSR campaigns, and analyse possible corrective actions. The second part of the talk addresses a different lay belief, namely, that unhealthy foods are tasty (the “Unhealthy=Tasty Intuition” or “UTI”; Raghunathan et al., 2006). One paper demonstrates a positive effect of UTI on BMI across several countries, and a follow-up finds intergenerational effects of parents’ beliefs on their children’s BMI. Parents’ UTI positively influences their children’s BMI because extrinsic rewards are used to encourage healthy eating, ironically reducing children’s healthy food consumption.
