Healthy Diets and Empty Wallets: The Healthy = Expensive Intuition

Consumers make multiple food decisions every day, and, as a result, simplifying heuristics, intuitions, and environmental cues are often employed to facilitate efficient and effective decision making. We examine an intuition at the crossroads of two important criteria for food decision making: healthiness and cost. We propose that just as consumers believe that unhealthy food is tastier, they also believe it is less expensive, that is, that healthy = expensive. Across five studies, we show that this intuition impacts consumer perceptions and decision making in a variety of important ways, including impacting inferences of missing attributes, choice between alternatives, and even perceptions of the importance of specific health claims. One of the key findings from these studies is that consumers with a goal to make healthy choices default to choosing more expensive options while those with a goal to save money default to choosing less healthy options. Belief in the intuition appears to lead consumers to act as if they must choose between making healthy choices and making frugal choices, resulting in suboptimal decisions for either health or financial goals. We close with a discussion of the implications of such intuition-driven choices for consumers, marketers, and public policy makers.