Anchoring climate-friendly food options

Danny Kahneman’s research on anchoring effects and attention, as detailed in his “Thinking, Fast and Slow” framework, demonstrates how initial information (anchors) significantly influences decision-making, often leading to biases due to insufficient adjustment from these starting points. This dichotomy between fast, heuristic-based thinking (System 1) and slow, analytical thinking (System 2) is crucial in understanding consumer behaviour. Food-delivery platforms, which have surged in popularity, present unique opportunities to design user interfaces that leverage these anchoring effects to promote healthier and more sustainable meal choices. Lohmann et al. (2024) found that repositioning menus based on sustainability is a particularly effective intervention compared to carbon footprint labels, which were less effective on average. Their study also highlighted that inattention might amplify anchoring effects, with significantly larger treatment effects observed for participants who made quick decisions (under a minute) in both labelling and repositioning conditions. However, the reliance on endogenous measures of attention, such as time spent on the platform, limits the causal interpretation of these findings and does not fully elucidate the decision-making process. Our study aims to address these gaps by exogenously varying attention through a continuous time-pressure choice-process elicitation mechanism to uncover the underlying decision processes in food choices under different policy interventions. If our research corroborates the initial findings, it could have profound implications for designing sustainable food policies that either leverage inattention and inertia (like repositioning or defaults) or require sufficient attention (such as carbon labelling). These insights will be invaluable for behavioural designers and policymakers aiming to foster healthier and more sustainable consumer choices.