In their study into children's snack choice in Indonesia, the authors found that the adverse effect of observing a peer eating the unhealthy snack is very large compared to a moderate affect of emoji labels encouraging healthy choices.
The authors conducted an experiment in which children were asked to choose a snack. Some of the children were offered snacks with emoji labels encouraging healthy snacks, others observed healthy or unhealthy snacking by peers.
They show that the study context, urban Indonesia, the negative influence of an unhealthy snacking peer is much larger than the positive effect of emoji labels promoting the choice of a healthy snack and a peer consuming a healthy snack.
At the same time, the provision of educational information about healthy eating does not aid the positive effects of emoji labels and healthy eating peers, nor does it mitigate the negative influence of unhealthy snack choices of peers.
'Snacks, nudges and asymmetric peer influence: Evidence from food choice experiments in children in Indonesia' - read the article online
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