Behaviour and Health Research Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Psychology, Upper Mountjoy, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Health Psychol Rev. 2022 Mar;16(1):67-80. doi: 10.1080/17437199.2020.1829980. Epub 2020 Oct 2.
Public support for many policies that tackle obesity by changing environments is low. This may reflect commonly held causal beliefs about obesity, namely that it is due to failures of self-control rather than environmental influences. Several studies have sought to increase public support by changing these and similar causal beliefs, with mixed results. The current review is the first systematic synthesis of these studies. Searches of PsycInfo, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, and Open Grey yielded 20 eligible studies ( = 8977) from 11,776 abstracts. Eligible studies were controlled experiments with an intervention group that communicated information about the environment's role in obesity, and a measure of support for environment-based obesity policies. The protocol was prospectively registered on PROSPERO. Meta-analyses showed no evidence that communicating information about the environment's influence on obesity changed policy support or the belief that the environment influences obesity. A likely explanation for this null effect is the ineffectiveness of interventions that were designed to change the belief that the environment influences obesity. The possibility remains, however, that the association observed between beliefs about the causes of obesity and attitudes towards obesity policies is correlational and not causal.
公众对通过改变环境来解决肥胖问题的许多政策的支持率很低。这可能反映了人们普遍持有的关于肥胖的因果信念，即肥胖是由于自我控制的失败，而不是环境的影响。有几项研究试图通过改变这些和类似的因果信念来增加公众的支持，但结果喜忧参半。本综述是对这些研究的首次系统综合。对 PsycInfo、Medline、Web of Science、Scopus 和 Open Grey 的搜索从 11776 篇摘要中得到了 20 项符合条件的研究（ = 8977）。符合条件的研究是对照实验，干预组传达了环境对肥胖影响的信息，以及衡量对基于环境的肥胖政策的支持程度。该方案已在 PROSPERO 上预先注册。荟萃分析表明，没有证据表明传达有关环境对肥胖影响的信息会改变对环境政策的支持或相信环境会影响肥胖。这种无效的可能解释是，旨在改变环境影响肥胖的信念的干预措施没有效果。然而，肥胖原因的信念与肥胖政策态度之间观察到的关联仍然存在，这可能是相关的，而不是因果关系。
