The Visual Minority Effect on Children's Choice and Consumption

• Main Authors: Maimaran, Michal, Salant, Yuval
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children & youth; Consumer behavior; Consumption; Food
• ISSN: 0098-9258

The increasing rate of children obesity (Hedley et al. 2004; Troiano and Flegal 1998) highlights the importance of encouraging children to consume healthy food from young age. Because younger children are guided primarily by perception, it is possible that pro- viding them with simple visual cues may improve their food and oth- er choices. This paper establishes that this is indeed the case: children tend to choose the minority option when items are visually different from one another and this can influence their food choices. We study the choice behavior of children four and five years old. Children this age rely on visual and other perceptual features more than on abstract thought (Flavel 1963; Ginsburg and Opper 1988; John 1999). We extend this developmental theory to the con- text of children's decision making and postulate that children tend to choose objects that visually stand out in the choice set even when they prefer another object in the set. We focus on choice sets in which each object appears multiple times. We conjecture that when objects are visually different, the minority object (i.e., appears fewest times) stands out visually relative to other objects. Because children are af- fected by perception, they will tend to choose the minority object more frequently than dictated by their preferences. On the other hand, when objects are visually similar, the minority object does not stand out visually, so children choose based on their preferences. We call the tendency of children to choose the minority object when ob- jects are visually different the visual minority effect. We conducted four experiments to test our theory and its policy implications. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 were conducted in a local pre- school. These experiments involved individual sessions in which 4 to 5.5 year old children interacted with an experimenter who was blind to the research hypothesis. Experiment 1 and 2 demonstrate the visual minority effect in food and non-food choice tasks. Experi- ment 3 illustrates that the visual minority effect may lead children to favor fruits over crackers. Experiment 4 illustrates that adults do not demonstrate the visual minority effect. In experiment 1, children (N=61) chose an apple, a bag of crackers, a magnifying glass and a bag to put all their chosen prod- ucts. Specifically, about half of the children choose an apple from a bowl with five green apples and two red apples (i.e., red is minor- ity). The rest choose from a bowl with fi