Salience, transparency, and self-nudging: a digital nudge to promote healthier food product choices

ABSTRACT

Information Systems (IS) research has proposed digital nudges as a promising toolset for supporting consumers in making better decisions. However, there is a vivid academic debate regarding the ethical underpinnings of nudging and potential measures to alleviate ethical concerns. One particularly promising approach to digital nudging is leveraging salience effects. Yet, the potential of digital salience nudges remains underexplored in IS literature, and little is known about how measures proposed to alleviate ethical concerns affect their behavioural impact. In a preregistered online experiment (N = 600), we assess the effects of a digital salience nudge on the healthiness of food product choices. Additionally, we examine how two proposed ethical measures, namely transparency and self-nudging, influence the nudge’s effects. We find that implementing the digital salience nudge in an online supermarket decreased the proportion of unhealthy food products chosen by 63% and increased the proportion of healthy alternatives by 30%. Notably, disclosing transparent information about the nudge did not impact its effectiveness. Offering the nudge as a self-nudge led to comparable effects to a preset nudge when combined with transparent information. We conclude that digital salience nudging is effective and that nudges can be ethically designed without compromising their behavioural impact.

KEYWORDS:

• digital nudging
• salience
• ethics
• transparency
• self-nudging
• ecommerce

Acknowledgement

The authors thank senior editor Sabine Matook, the anonymous associate editor, and the reviewers for their valuable feedback during the review process. Special thanks go to Alexander Glas, Lena Sophia Müller, and Daniel Perico Ortiz for their support with the statistical analyses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We initially hypothesised that the effects of our digital salience nudge on the proportion of (un-)healthy food products would be greater for individuals who implemented it as a self-nudge. We changed this hypothesis for a more holistic view, but still report the results of the instrumental variable regressions testing these hypotheses in Appendix D. We do not report our results on the effects of our interventions on the participants' acceptance of the nudge in this paper.

2. The implementation of the nudge in the self-nudging groups was endogenous. To account for self-selection effects, we additionally calculated instrumental variable regressions that fully supported our main findings and are reported in Appendix D.

3. We did not include the prices of the individual products in our model because the food products in all categories were balanced across three price and healthiness levels and we only analysed the food product choices on an aggregated level.

Additional information

Funding

Parts of this research was funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts, in a program coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt).