A View to a Choice: The Effects of Lateral Visual Field on Choosing between Healthy Versus Unhealthy Food Options

Suppose you had the option to choose between a healthy (e.g., salad) and an unhealthy (e.g., chocolate cake) food item, with one item placed on your left visual field and the other item placed on your right visual field. Would the lateral (left vs. right) visual field positions of the healthy versus unhealthy items influence your choices? Prior research has examined different factors that could influence choices between healthy versus unhealthy food items, such as the body type of people in the surroundings (McFerran et al. 2010), package cues of the products (Deng and Kahn 2009), and affective/ cognitive states (Shiv and Fedorikhin 1999), among others. However, no study, to the best of our knowledge, has examined the effects of presenting healthy versus unhealthy options in different lateral visual fields on consumer choices. In this paper, we examine this research question through the help of four experiments. The results of our studies suggest that a healthier food option is more likely to be selected when it is placed on the left (vs. right) visual field.