Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched food preferences

• Main Authors: FOLWARCZNY, Michal, OTTERBRING, Tobias, SIGURDSSON, Valdimar, TAN, Lynn K. L., LI, Norman P.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: consumer behavior; evolutionary mismatch; food preferences; food marketing; Applied Behavior Analysis; Social Psychology; Social Psychology and Interaction
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3579; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4837/viewcontent/OldMinds_NewMarketplaces_sv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Principally due to unhealthy food choices, almost half of adults worldwide are overweight or obese. Current food retail practices bear some responsibility for such public health issues. We argue that numerous attempts to promote healthy eating have been unsuccessful due to the failure to account for our outdated evolved food selection mechanisms. Building on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis and contrasting ancestral versus present-day foraging environments, we discuss how marketing activities exploit evolutionarily old food preferences and elicit unhealthy food choices for profit maximization at the expense of public health in terms of food consumption. We conclude by explaining how to mitigate this harmful trend by applying the law of law’s leverage to facilitate effective strategies to increase healthy food choices. Notably, we show how evolutionary psychology principles can be used to reconcile competing interests between consumers, retailers, and decision-makers responsible for public health policies.