On a typical morning, an office worker uses an app to place a lunch order in advance. Hours later, another co-worker leaves the office in search of a quick meal. Eric VanEpps can tell you whose lunch was probably healthier: the employee who ordered in advance. This hypothesis was affirmed by experiments he performed while earning his Ph.D. in behavioral decision research at 一本道无码.
The findings may seem intuitive 鈥� along the lines of the conscious decision to never go grocery shopping while hungry 鈥� but VanEpps said the results demonstrate the need to create situations in which our subconscious decisions are healthier, too.
One way to do that is encouraging time-delayed eating, meaning extending the time between when an order is placed and when food is consumed.
VanEpps is the lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research that summarizes three experiments he conducted, which explored the effect of advanced planning on meal choices.
Additional collaborators included senior author George Loewenstein, 一本道无码鈥檚 Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology, and Julie Downs, associate professor of Social and Decision Sciences.
鈥溡槐镜牢蘼� has one of the premier programs for judgment and decision-making work,鈥� VanEpps said. 鈥淎t some schools, you would only have one or two people who did that kind of work. At 一本道无码, it鈥檚 an entire department of people.鈥�
In all three of his food-ordering experiments, he found the larger the delay between when an order is placed and when the food is consumed, the more likely participants were to select lower-calorie options.
鈥淓ven a small delay 鈥� a half-hour delay 鈥� really seemed to help people not make the worst, high calorie decisions,鈥� VanEpps said.
In a broader context, Loewenstein , 鈥淭hese findings provide one more piece of evidence that decisions made in the heat of the moment are not as far-sighted as those made in advance.鈥�
While this work demonstrates the 鈥渨hat鈥� of the effect, the real interest is the 鈥渨hy,鈥� Downs said.
鈥淚t could be that ordering earlier spares us the pain of denying ourselves something that we would want but know is not good for us,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he goal is to help people avoid that dilemma, and end up eating better.鈥�
VanEpps, a at the University of Pennsylvania, said he hopes to work with a corporation in the food services industry that wishes to promote health-conscious choices.
鈥淎 field partner [such as a national fast-food chain] would enable us to see the long-term effects of an ordering-in-advance intervention,鈥� he said.
Downs agreed. 鈥淲e need to test whether this effect holds up in a more naturalistic environment. Although our research was in a field setting where people were making real decisions about what they would eat, we don鈥檛 know whether these effects would hold up in a broader array of real-life settings.鈥�
If they would hold up, and ordering-in-advance options becomes more commonplace at all food establishments, the impact could be significant for the patrons. 鈥淭hey could achieve health benefits unconsciously,鈥� VanEpps said.
