Anxiety and search during food choice: the moderating role of attitude towards nutritional claims
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to investigate the effect of anxiety on information search during food choice and to test a key moderator of the effect of anxiety on search, namely attitude towards nutritional claims. Design/methodology/approach By means of qualitative study the paper investigates the notion that consumers experience anxiety about health outcomes during food choice. Further, by means of structural equation modelling based on two studies with representative samples of Danish consumers, the paper investigates the effects outlined above. Findings The authors show that anxiety during food choice increases information search in four product categories – ready dinner meals, salad dressing, biscuits, and cakes. Further, the results show that the positive effect of anxiety on information search is stronger when consumers have a less favourable attitude towards nutritional claims on the product label. Practical implications The results suggest that anxiety during food choice is desirable from the consumer welfare point of view since it leads to more informed consumers. The results also indicate that public policy makers should educate consumers to be critical about nutritional claims, since this would increase consumers' propensity to search for health information. In turn, from a managerial point of view this suggests that providers of healthy food should provide extended health information for consumers that are sceptical about nutritional claims since their scepticism towards this type of condensed information will in fact motivate extended information search. Originality/value This paper contributes to research in marketing on food choice and consumption: a consumption area that is important but difficult to navigate due to an increasing complexity of nutritional information at the point of sale. This paper demonstrates that situational, choice‐based anxiety and scepticism towards nutritional claims may actually be good things by prompting consumers to undertake search, and hence ultimately make more informed choices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it