Informatics Seminar

You are cordially invited to the following Health Informatics Seminar.

Thursday, March 11, 2010
Noon
Lindley Hall Room 101

Peter M. Todd, PhD
Professor of Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences Indiana University

"Delivering Information to Help Shoppers Make Healthier Choices"

Abstract:
Traditional views of rational decision making propose that individuals should use all the information they can get their hands on to make fully informed choices. This can be a particularly daunting prospect in modern-day choice settings, such as supermarkets, where options proliferate along with facts—nutrition data, ingredient lists, health claims, and the like—about each one.But given that human and animal minds have evolved to be quick and just “good enough” in environments where information could often be costly and difficult to obtain, we should instead expect individuals to draw on an “adaptive toolbox” of simple, fast and frugal heuristics that make good decisions with limited information processing. These heuristics typically ignore most of the available information and rely on only a few important cues, leading shoppers for instance to buy brands they recognize or products they remember simply as tasty.What can we do then if we want people to pay attention to more information that could help them make healthier purchase choices, such as the calories or salt content of the items? How can we help ensure that these new facts won’t simply be ignored like most nutrition labeling is?In this talk, I will cover some of the decision-making psychology behind this problem, and present some new ideas for ubiquitous-computing approaches that might help to overcome it.