Anchoring climate-friendly food options: Interventions, mechanisms, and cultural differences

One of Daniel Kahneman’s significant contributions to the field is his research on anchoring effects and attention, as well as how these factors influence decision-making where he demonstrated that individuals heavily rely on initial pieces of information (anchors) when making estimates or judgments. These, however, often lead to biases in decision-making. Food-delivery platforms have become more prominent in recent years, offering unique opportunities to design user interfaces that harness anchoring effects (or ‘first offer effects’) to encourage customers to choose healthy meals with a smaller carbon footprint.

Supporting this, previous research finds that repositioning menus in order of sustainability is a particularly effective intervention. In contrast, carbon footprint labels, which may direct attention toward the issue of carbon emissions and improve knowledge, were less effective on average. It also shows that inattention may be an important mechanism for amplifying anchoring effects, finding the treatment effects substantially larger in participants who ordered their meals in less than a minute in both labelling and repositioning conditions.

This project aims to uncover the decision process underlying food choices under different food policy interventions by exogenously varying attention using a continuous time-pressure choice-process elicitation mechanism. If the research confirms the initial findings, it would have profound implications for the design of sustainable food policies that, on the one hand, leverage inattention and inertia (such as repositioning or defaults) or, on the other hand, rely on sufficient attention (such as carbon labelling). The findings will have practical implications for the work of behavioural designers and policymakers.