Nudging with Attribution Bias: Promoting Healthy Over Unhealthy Food Preferences

Diet-related diseases are a leading contributor to global morbidity, mortality, and rising health expenditures. Beyond direct health impacts, poor diets also impose large social and economic costs through lost productivity, increased healthcare demand, and long-term fiscal pressures on public systems. These challenges raise the importance of identifying behavioral mechanisms that systematically bias food choice and exploring how they can be leveraged to improve consumer diets. One such mechanism is attribution bias—the tendency for individuals to misattribute state-driven experiences to intrinsic product properties. While widely observed in behavioral studies, little is known about the internal mechanisms through which attribution bias shapes preferences, and whether this bias can be leveraged in behavioral nudges to steer individual choices away from unhealthy foods towards healthier alternatives. This study fills this gap by integrating behavioral and neuroeconomic methods to examine how hunger-induced attribution bias influences choice between healthy and unhealthy snack alternatives.