It is often taken for granted that more information – or at least more well-designed, easily understandable information – will always be welcome. So in the UK, traffic light diagrams representing nasty sugars and fats is increasingly plastered across food products. But do most people want to know?
In a very preliminary first draft of a paper* on what they call “Strategic Self-Ignorance”, researchers Linda Thunstrom, Jonas Nordstrom, Jason Shogren, and Mariah Ehmke describe an experiment to find out. They offer some lucky participants a choice of lunchtime meals: chicken and bulgur or roast beef and glass noodles. Before choosing a meal, participants had to pick one of two folded sheets of paper: one of which contained calorie information. The idea was to make it costless to access information about the meal before making a choice. Basically, if you were a lucky lunchtime diner, you might as well pick up the paper containing calorie information, even if you weren’t interested in it.
[In case you’re wondering, the roast beef and noodles had 490 calories, compared to 900 in the chicken and bulgur. Who knew? I thought chicken and bulgur sounded like the healthy option.]
According to this preliminary draft, the majority of lucky lunchtime diners picked up the piece of paper containing no calorie information – preferring not to know. As you might expect, people were more likely to ignore information if they expected the meal to be tasty.
We already know that information needs to be easily accessible and digestible for people to be able to use it to make decisions. But here’s another problem: giving people the option of more information may not work – particularly where there is a conflict between short-term gratification (tasty chicken) and long-term health (heart attacks et al.). It’s almost as if the conflict is so painful that some people would prefer to avoid it: and not knowing for sure that there is a conflict at all is a good way of doing just that.
The preliminary draft of “Strategic Self-Ignorance” is here.
*On the front of the paper, it says “PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE!”. I am strategically ignoring this because the study is just too interesting. Sorry. I hope my insertion of the words “preliminary” and “draft” across the post makes up for this.
What’s the difference between a banker and a GP?
This week the Financial Services Authority issued a “wake-up call” to the financial services market to re-think the way staff are rewarded. Consumer trust in financial services providers is in tatters. The market has been hit by a spate of mis-selling scandals including investment schemes and payment protection insurance. The FSA has becoming increasingly concerned that many of those who advise customers on the best product are on bonus-based incentive schemes that are “rotten to the core”. The result is that those selling or giving advice are perceived to be motivated mainly by the rewards on offer to them – and the consumer loses out.
Meanwhile, in another sector, the function of advice and financial management is arguably becoming more and more linked: a key reason for the recent health care reforms is to bring responsibility for healthcare expenditure closer to GPs – thereby ensuring that commissioning decisions provide value for money.
Conflicts of interest in the NHS are not new: the growth in the use of financial incentives in healthcare has been around for years. This week, even before the current reforms take full effect, the BMA claimed that the NHS is offering GP practices money in return for sending fewer patients to hospital – money that can be used either on improving services or on boosting GPs’ own salaries. The Department of Health responded by saying that it will stop such contracts.
But by bringing financial decisions and the provision of medical advice ever closer together, the current reforms are, if anything, likely to entrench these types of conflict of interest. And pressures to save money are hardly going to go away in the near future as the NHS battles to save up to £20billion by 2014-15.
In financial markets, mixing financial incentives and the provision of advice has undermined professional standards, resulting in scandal after scandal, and consumers ending up with products they don’t want or need. At the moment, trust in GPs is high. But healthcare markets should heed the warnings of the financial sector. Badly structured incentives can damage relationships with patients and weaken trust in the whole market. Let’s not forget that once upon a time, bankers were seen as sound and trustworthy too.
This post was first published on the SMF Market Square.