Portraying Humans as Machines to Promote Health: Unintended Risks, Mechanisms, and Solutions

Abstract

To fight obesity and educate consumers on how the human body functions, health education and marketing materials often highlight the importance of adopting a cognitive approach to food. One strategy employed to promote this approach is to portray humans as machines. Five studies (and three replication and follow-up studies) using different human-as-machine stimuli (internal body composition, face, appearance, and physical movement) revealed divergent effects of human-as-machine representations. While these stimuli promoted healthier choices among consumers who were high in eating self-efficacy, they backfired among consumers who were low in eating self-efficacy (measured in Studies 1 and 3–5; manipulated in Study 2). This reversal happened because portraying humans as machines activated consumers’ expectation of adopting a cognitive, machine-like approach to food (Studies 3 and 4)—an expectation that was too difficult to meet for those with low (vs. high) eating self-efficacy. We tested a solution to accompany human-as-machine stimuli in the field (Study 5): Externally enhancing how easy and doable it was for consumers low in eating self-efficacy to meet the expectation of adopting a cognitive approach to food, which effectively attenuated the backfire effect on their lunch choices at a cafeteria.

50 years of social marketing: seeding solutions for the future

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Older Adults’ Exposure to Food Media Induced Unhealthy Eating during the COVID-19 Omicron Lockdown? Exploring Negative Emotions and Associated Literacy and Efficacy on Shanghainese

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Marketing in the Health Care Sector: Disrupted Exchanges and New Research Directions

“…We do know that computers that disclose information tend to generate more disclosures from people (Moon 2000). We also know that portraying humans as machines in promoting healthy eating is helpful (backfires) for consumers with high (low) eating self-efficacy (Weihrauch and Huang 2021). Finally, given research showing that consumers engage in compensatory consumption responses, such as ordering and eating more food, when they interact with humanoid service robots (with faces, arms, and legs; Mende et al 2019), we need to look for paths to mitigate these tendencies in either expectations about the robots or in their design.…”