Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Health Behavior, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Ann Behav Med. 2020 Sep 1;54(9):691-702. doi: 10.1093/abm/kaaa011.
To reduce diet-related chronic disease, policymakers have proposed requiring health warnings on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). Health warnings reduced purchases of these products by 22% in our recent randomized controlled trial, but the mechanisms remain unclear.
We sought to identify the psychological mechanisms that explain why SSB health warnings affect purchase behavior.
In 2018, we recruited 400 adult SSB consumers to complete a shopping task in a naturalistic convenience store laboratory in North Carolina, USA. We randomly assigned participants to either a health warning arm (all SSBs in the store displayed a text health warning) or to a control arm (SSBs displayed a control label). Participants selected items to purchase with cash.
Compared to control labels, health warnings elicited more attention, negative affect, anticipated social interactions, and thinking about harms (range of ds = 0.63-1.34; all p < .001). Health warnings also led to higher injunctive norms about limiting SSB consumption (d = 0.27, p = .008). Except for attention, all of these constructs mediated the effect of health warnings on SSB purchases (all p < .05). In contrast, health warnings did not influence other attitudes or beliefs about SSBs or SSB consumption (e.g., healthfulness, outcome expectations, and response efficacy).
Health warnings on sugar-sweetened beverages affected purchase behavior by eliciting negative emotions, increasing anticipated social interactions, keeping SSBs' harms at top of mind, and shifting norms about beverage consumption. Results are consistent with recent studies of why tobacco warnings influence quitting behavior, pointing toward a general framework for understanding how health warnings affect behavior.
NCT #03511937.
为了减少与饮食相关的慢性疾病，政策制定者提议在含糖饮料（SSB）上贴上健康警示标签。我们最近的一项随机对照试验表明，健康警示标签使这些产品的购买量减少了 22%，但作用机制仍不清楚。
我们试图确定解释 SSB 健康警示标签如何影响购买行为的心理机制。
2018 年，我们在美国北卡罗来纳州的一家便利店内招募了 400 名 SSB 消费者参与购物任务。我们将参与者随机分配到健康警示标签组（店内所有 SSB 均显示文本健康警示标签）或对照组（SSB 显示控制标签）。参与者用现金购买商品。
与控制标签相比，健康警示标签引起了更多的注意力、负面情绪、预期的社交互动和对危害的思考（ds 范围为 0.63-1.34；均 p<0.001）。健康警示标签还导致了对限制 SSB 消费的更高的禁令规范（d=0.27，p=0.008）。除了注意力之外，所有这些结构都在健康警示标签对 SSB 购买的影响中起中介作用（均 p<0.05）。相比之下，健康警示标签并没有影响对 SSB 或 SSB 消费的其他态度或信念（例如，健康益处、结果预期和反应效能）。
SSB 上的健康警示标签通过引起负面情绪、增加预期的社交互动、使 SSB 的危害始终处于首位以及改变对饮料消费的规范，影响了购买行为。结果与最近关于为什么烟草警示标签影响戒烟行为的研究一致，为理解健康警示标签如何影响行为提供了一个通用框架。
NCT #03511937。
