Evaluation mode affects choice of healthy and unhealthy Food: The role of taste and healthiness attribute evaluability

Understanding the determinants of healthy and unhealthy food choices is paramount to improving public health. This paper zooms in on the role of evaluation mode (i.e., separate versus joint evaluation) in consumers’ food choices. A series of four studies in the paper and four studies in the online appendix (N = 2024) investigate the effect of evaluation mode on the choice share of healthy and unhealthy foods. In line with earlier work in various domains, the results demonstrate that joint evaluation of healthy and unhealthy food options improves consumers’ decision-making by decreasing (increasing) the choice share of unhealthy (healthy) food, compared to the separate evaluation mode. We show that this relies on the simple fact that the healthiness attribute is difficult to judge in isolation, certainly in comparison with the taste attribute. Indeed, when healthiness becomes easier to evaluate, unhealthy choices become more frequent in the joint evaluation mode as well. The studies are set up to allow us to distinguish the evaluability account from the justification and the goal-highlighting accounts. The theoretical contributions, the methodological implications for the self-control literature, and the managerial implications are discussed.