‘Does This Tax Make Me Look Fat?’: Using Stigma Inducing Labels to Decrease Unhealthy Food Consumption

Obesity and unhealthy food consumption are two of the largest public health concerns nationwide. Obesity rates have more than doubled in the past few decades. While there is debate regarding the cause of obesity, most research has argued that increased consumption of unhealthy food and beverages is a major driver of obesity (Chandon and Wansink 2007, 2011; Young and Nestle 2002). Many public health advocates have suggested that large-scale interventions are necessary to combat the epidemic. While there are proponents of increased nutrition education, others have suggested the use of a tax on unhealthy food and drinks. Although an economic approach is one possible way to attenuate consumption of unhealthy food, will consumers even notice a price change? Are there other approaches that may be equally, if not more so effective? For example, an intervention that explicitly associates unhealthy food choices to an undesirable social identity may actually be more effective at reducing consumption. Consumer research has shown that individuals attribute a wide array of traits and characteristics such as social appeal, morality, and gender roles to others based on their food choices and consumption habits (Rozin et al. 2012). As a result, what one chooses to eat can have important implications for not only one’s sense of self but also impression management, social judgment, and status (Vartanian, Herman, and Polivy 2007). One of the most devalued and negative identities in social contexts is stigma, which Goffman (1963) characterized as one of the greatest social risks that reduces the stigma bearer “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (p. 3). Given that individuals are conscious of their social identity and strongly seek to avoid social stigmatization from engaging in negative or deviant behavior, it is surprising how little research has examined the influence of explicit stigma-inducing signals on how individuals make food choices, a major area of interest in public health. Using the context of food choice and consumption in a real world social setting and in controlled lab experiments, we examined the unique and combined effect of economic and stigma-inducing interventions on food choice and consumption. We also investigated whether gender and social context (i.e., whether one dines with a friend or alone) moderated the effectiveness of these interventions. Finally, we examined whether self-construal differences between men and women, specifically independent self-construal versus interdependent self-construal, mediated the effectiveness of these interventions on unhealthy food choices.