"useless" nutritional labeling

Café,

More evidence that information styling is important if you want to 
reach a broad audience with your information and influence behavior:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/05/05/pm-will-posting-calorie-labels-help-ariely-q/

That's my interpretation of the research summary given by Dan Ariely 
(author of _Predictably Irrational_) in his brief 5/5/2010 interview 
on the U.S. radio program, _Marketplace_.

I usually agree with Ariely's findings, but in this case, thought his 
statistical analysis lacked the more nuanced understanding of 
individual motivation, choice & behavior provided by a good audience 
analysis. There's an awful lot of context (the rhetoricians' 
"situation") ignored by Ariely's research, which doesn't account for 
evolving individual decision matrices.

We're not just irrational, "mindless" eaters ... although that is 
certainly an important part of it.

But for most of us, building familiarity and changing habitual 
behaviors takes time, and the most accurate research measures behavior 
over years, not weeks.

As I see it, different groups of people have different information 
needs, and will have different reactions to the unadorned information 
in a nutritional label, depending on level of familiarity. And 
Ariely's research doesn't account for this.

I do think better styling would help reach those who are not already 
familiar with nutritional facts & issues, and the added entertainment 
introduced by a more compelling presentation certainly won't turn off 
those who already have a keen personal interest in the subject.

But, as the many commentators who posted (interesting!) responses to 
the interview with Ariely point out, even the standardized 
plain-vanilla labels of government regulators are effective for some 
audiences.

Also, I note that at least one respondent describes the difficulties 
of counting calories and other things (like fat, sodium, potassium, 
carbohydrates, fiber) when cooking for oneself.

... As I said before, there have got to be several business 
opportunities here for enterprising information designers! <bg>

Deborah
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Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]
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