Slogans and social pressure for healthy food choices

In today’s environment, overweight is common occurrence. We need to see this as a real problem, because overweight people are at a higher risk for some serious diseases. Those diseases need expensive treatments, plus people that suffer from them are likely not able to work for a period or long time. This costs the society a lot of money When thinking of ways to solve this problem I wondered if slogans and social pressure could play a role. To test this, an experiment was set-up in the supermarket Albert Heijn. In my experiment actual behavior was tested and over 200 respondents participated. A difference was made between people without overweight and people with overweight. Reason for this, is that it is more important to get overweight people to eat more healthy, than non-overweight people. So possible different reactions are important to find. The results of the experiment showed that slogans do have an effect on the eating pattern of people with overweight. However, this does not apply to people without overweight. Social pressure was found to have no effect on both groups, nor was there a interaction effect between slogan and social pressure for both groups. After noticing that only overweight people were influenced by the slogan, I started to wonder if slogans could be a cause of their overweight, or if it is due to their overweight that people are influenced by slogans. Future research is needed to study this.