When distorted self-image takes its toll: The effects on the health of European females

by Joan Costa-i-Font and Mireia Jofre-Bonet

Vox
January 30, 2012

Striving for the perfect body can take its toll, both physically and mentally. This column shows how excessive preoccupation with self-appearance can give rise to preventable eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, among European females. It is time for policy action to shift people’s perceptions of their ideal body closer to what is healthiest.

Policy interventions to curb the parallel epidemics of excessive preoccupation with self-image and food disorders, such as bulimia and anorexia, are increasingly being used, including the regulation of the fashion industry and advertisements, as well as support campaigns through social networks (Borzekowski et al. 2010) and the media (Burke 2009). In some European countries, there has been increasing debate over the conditions, especially since the Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died from anorexia in 2006.

More generally, it is becoming increasingly apparent that standards of physical appearance are important and powerful motivators of human behaviour, especially regarding health and food. Excessive preoccupation with self-image is regarded as a contributing factor to the proliferation of food disorders, especially among young women. Anorexia, together with other food disorders such as bulimia nervosa, can be characterised by a distorted body image accompanied by an eating obsession.

Social sciences regard social image as being continually under construction and essential in determining physical, psychological, and social equilibrium. Hence, one can expect a tension between aesthetic and other reactions to food ingestion. When applied to food disorders, this could explain some of the extreme forms of weight aversion – particularly those that require policy attention.

We argue that a distorted self-image influences health-related behaviours, specifically food disorders. We test our claims empirically using European data and find evidence consistent with Figure 1, namely that those females with a distorted self-image choose a net caloric intake that is under the optimal net caloric intake. The distortion is explained by the influence of ‘peer weight’ (which is likely to influence self-image or social identity) on the likelihood of anorexia, and the influence of self-image on individual weight. We support the hypothesis that social pressure through peer shape is a determinant in explaining anorexia nervosa and a distorted self-perception of one's own body.

Figure 1. The utility of net caloric intake

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Watchdog to protect ‘irrational’ investors

Financial Times
January 24, 2012

Investors cannot be counted on to make rational choices so regulators need to “step into their footprints” and limit or ban the sale of potentially harmful products, the head of the UK’s new consumer protection watchdog said on Tuesday.

In his first big interview since starting work last autumn, Martin Wheatley told the Financial Times that the 2008 financial crisis had fundamentally reshaped regulators’ assumptions about the people they protected.

“You have to assume that you don’t have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information, they default ... They hide behind credit rating agencies or behind the promises that are given to them by the salesperson,” said Mr Wheatley, a key figure in the government’s effort to revamp financial regulation.

Under the government’s plan to break up the Financial Services Authority, the FCA, headed by Mr Wheatley, will spin out as an independent agency early next year and be granted enhanced powers to police markets and protect investors. It intends to be far more interventionist in an effort to head off the mis-selling scandals that have dogged the financial sector in recent years.

The new approach rests on research in behavioural economics that shows investors often make decisions contrary to their own interests because of their aversion to losses or unwillingness to ditch a losing strategy. It represents a profound shift in regulatory stance.

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Religion matters, in life and death

by Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann

Vox
January 15, 2012

Does religion affect suicide? This column presents new evidence from 19th century Prussia showing that suicide rates are much higher in Protestant than in Catholic areas, and that this reflects a causal effect of Protestantism. It also suggests that economic modelling can help understand why this is so.

As early as 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1897) in his classic Le suicide presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been “accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law” (Pope and Danigelis 1981).

And even today, Protestant countries tend to have substantially higher suicide rates, suggesting that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic – not least because about one million people commit suicide worldwide every year, making suicide a leading cause of death in particular among young adults (World Health Organisation 2008). Clearly, the large prevalence of suicide creates far-reaching emotional, social, and economic ramifications and invokes major policy efforts to prevent them.

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A Dieting Conundrum: Why dieters underestimate calorie counts of meals

Based on the research of Alexander Chernev

Kellogg Insight
January 12, 2012

In the effort to combat the burgeoning problem of obesity, authorities such as the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization promote the benefits of healthy eating plans that include plenty of fruits and vegetables. Individuals concerned with their weight often internalize that message. But they frequently do so in an irrational way. According to research by Alexander Chernev, an associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, many think that adding a “healthy” option, such as a side dish of celery and carrots, to a high-calorie meal such as a cheesesteak somehow reduces the meal’s overall calorie content.

Chernev’s research also gives the tale an added twist: the more serious that individuals are about dieting, he finds, the more likely they are to fall for this “side salad illusion.” “People often behave in a way that is illogical and ultimately counterproductive to their goals,” Chernev says. “We’ve shown that people on a diet are more likely to underestimate the calorie count of combinations of healthy and unhealthy meals.”

The Dieter’s Paradox

Information about the “dieter’s paradox,” as Chernev calls it, emerged from a nationwide study in which more than 1,000 respondents were asked to estimate the calorie count of a variety of meals. About half the respondents saw a series of unhealthy meals: a hamburger, a bacon and cheese waffle sandwich, chili with beef, and a meatball pepperoni cheesesteak. The rest saw these same unhealthy meals accompanied by a healthy item—a few celery sticks, a small organic apple, a small salad without dressing, and a side dish of celery and carrots, respectively.

Respondents who saw only the unhealthy meals estimated that they contained 691 calories on average. But those who saw those same meals accompanied by the healthy items assessed the average calorie count at just 648. For example, participants shown a bowl of chili rated it as averaging 699 calories; however, participants who viewed the same bowl of chili combined with a green side salad rated it as having only 656 calories. In every case the addition of the healthy food item led to the erroneous perception that the number of calories had decreased.

After the participants evaluated the calories in these meals, they were asked to indicate the extent to which they were concerned with managing their weight. Astonishingly, the data showed that the most weight-conscious individuals believed most strongly in the apparent ability of a healthy option to reduce the calorie content of an unhealthy meal. Those more concerned with their weight rated the unhealthy item paired with a healthy one as having 615 calories—96 calories less than dieters who rated the unhealthy item alone. People less concerned with their weight were not as susceptible to the side salad illusion. They estimated the unhealthy–healthy combination as having only 26 calories less than the unhealthy item alone (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Weight-conscious individuals are more likely to believe that adding a healthy option to an unhealthy meal decreases a meal’s calorie content.

“The fact that those most concerned with their weight are also more likely to underestimate the calorie content of a meal is counterintuitive,” Chernev says. “It also means that they will be more likely to overconsume and consequently more likely to gain weight.”

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Four Economists Come Together to Say ‘We Agree’

by Claudia Goldin, William Nordhaus, Richard Schmalensee and Anil Kashyap

Bloomberg
January 5, 2012

“If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.” This old joke still works because it reflects a common belief that economists can’t agree on anything important. Yet the four of us are part of a project that we believe will demonstrate that this proposition is wrong.

Each week since late September, along with 37 other economists at top universities, we have been answering questions on major public policy issues. These include the predictability of the stock market, the best design for health insurance and the effect of China’s managed exchange rate. You can find our answers (and sign up to be notified of future poll results) here.

Why are we taking the time to do this? Although we can’t speak for the other distinguished panelists, the four of us are tired of seeing our profession’s views misrepresented in policy discussions.

We think there are two main reasons for the distortions. The first is the conventions of journalism itself: Although there are notable exceptions, most journalists have limited training in economics, and those who edit the articles often have even less. Hence, out of an understandable but misguided sense of fair play, there is a bias toward wanting to show both sides of an issue. When, for example, an economist tells a journalist the equivalent of 1+1=2, the writer, in an effort to provide “balance,” will often include a quote from someone who says that 1+1=3.

Second, editorial boards don’t want wishy-washy, hedged opinions. As a result, op-ed pages are more likely to publish someone advocating an unequivocal position than someone who offers a more nuanced argument. This favors fringe views. A position that sounds new, yet is completely untested, is all the more enticing to editors, so long as it appears to challenge mainstream views.

We don’t claim that there is research-based consensus among economists on all important policy questions. But even when there is broad agreement (say, 1+1=2), the news media rarely makes it clear that such a consensus exists.

To overcome this problem, we rely on a phenomenon that is often called the “wisdom of crowds” effect. It is based on the observation that the collective judgment of a diverse group of people about a question is almost always better than the answer of any single person from the group. (Think of the accuracy of the “Ask the Audience” lifeline in the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”)

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Be It Resolved

by John Tierney

New York Times
January 5, 2012

It's still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

The result is “ego depletion,” as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

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