I recently spoke with Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times. She’s an awesome healthcare reporter. She wrote a nice piece on some recent nudging research. Here’s the beginning of the article to whet your appetite: The letters doctors received from the county medical examiner included a shocking fact: A patient you once prescribed an…
Shutterstock If you experience a heart attack, you are probably going to need to take pills to prevent another such attack. People who take beta blockers, aspirin, or cholesterol pills after heart attacks are less likely to experience a second such attack. (Note: Don’t take any of these pills until you have spoken to your…
Shutterstock It has become trendy in health policy circles to believe that behavioral economic interventions are the key to health system improvement. After all, traditional economic interventions like pay per performance have generated underwhelming results, with little or no change in physician behavior. Why not try a non-financial, psychological intervention—like performance feedback! Well, a study…
If you use a smaller plate when you eat, you’ll eat less food. Here’s a rather wonky summary of research on plate size, a “meta-analysis” showing that smaller plates mean you put less food on the plate and, thus, eat less food. Less pie on your plate; less pie in your pie hole!
Warning – the warning labels pictured below are graphic but, according to a recent study, they increase the chances that people will quit smoking. Now we need to find a way to get legal permission to use such pictures, so we can shock people out of their habits.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, lots of companies are encouraging workers to get biometric screening. Here’s a picture of that: But is there evidence that this promotes healthier behavior? Would love someone to direct me to any relevant research.
Losing weight is hard. And keeping it off once you’ve lost it–that’s probably even harder. Just ask Oprah. So maybe those of us who are overweight or obese should simply focus on not gaining more weight than we’ve already gained. Surely that’s easier. Right? Well, not long ago a group of researchers ran a study…
The Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (yes, there is such a thing!) had an outstanding issue dedicated to eating behavior recently. Here is a picture from that issue worth sharing:
Money can undermine our morals. If you don’t believe me, look what happened to a group of four-through-six-year-olds who were brought in for a simple experiment. Researchers asked them to sort objects from a box. Half sorted coins, and half sorted buttons. Then they were asked to do one more thing–try to find their way…