Impact Of The Data Precision On Energy Perception And Food Choice In Food Calorie Labeling

Obesity is becoming more and more common and severe around the world. Many countries begin to use caloric information intervention, such as the mandatory provision of absolute calorie information, in order to control the growth rate of obesity. But only providing calorie information, a lot of people may not have the concept and do not care. The effect of the caloric information intervention is far from the expectations. Recently, scientists call for exercise data to burn off calorie to be printed on packaging instead of calories, in order to help consumer understand energy and choose low-calorie health food. In the previous researches relathed to the exercise data to burn off calorie, the presentation form and the precision of exercise data is not consistent. And the precision of data may affect cognition. Thus this paper examines two questions:Does the precision of exercise data to burn off calorie bias magnitude judgment? If so, do these biased judgments affect food choice? We propose that consumers tend to overestimate the magnitudes of precise exercise data to burn off calorie and we term this the precision effect of exercise data to burn off calorie. Furthermore, this effect can restrain consumers to choose high-calorie unhealthy food.In this study, we designed six closely related experiments to verify the hypothesis. Experiment 1 and 2 test the existence of the precision effect respectively presenting the stimuli in verbal format and graphic label format. Study 3 show the mediation mechanism of the precision effect——the miediating effect of energy-perception arousal. Study 4 and 5 explore the boundary condition of the precision effect through using units within different order of magnitude to express quantitative information. Study 6 is a field experiment, in which we design an authentic food selection situation to examine the impact of exercise data precision on food choice.A large number of experimental data has been collected through interviews, questionnaires and experimental stimuli. The following conclusions were drawm from the analysis of variance, bootstrap mediated test and chi square test by SPSS. (1) The precision of exercise data to burn off calorie does bias magnitude judgment of energy, that is, people tend to believe that the more precise the exercise data is, the higher the energy of food is. For example, participants in the experiment incorrectly judged the chocolate's energy to be higher with the information "walking 4.87km to burn off calorie of chocolate" than with the information "walking 5km to burn off calorie of chocolate". (2) We demonstrate the psychological mechanism of the precision effect——the more precise the exercise data is, the more attention, anxiety, vigilance and weight-gaining risk perception can be aroused, and then participants judged the food energy to be higher. (3) Using different magnitude units to describe the exercise information (with different magnitude number) can moderate the precision effect. Specifically, when we use large magnitude unit to describe the exercise information (with small numer), the precision effect is very significant, but when we use small magnitude unit (with large number), the precision effect disappeared. (4) If we present the relative caloric information with more precise exercise data to burn off calorie, the goal that nudge consumers choose low-calorie healthy food can be realized.