(Adnkronos) - Sulla base di un battage mediatico che induce a pensare che la parola ‘senza’ elimini qualcosa di nocivo, nel lungo termine si può incappare in errori di valutazione controproducenti per la nostra salute”. Lo dice Guendalina Graffigna, professore ordinario di Psicologia dei Consumi e della Salute presso l'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Piacenza, riportando i risultati di uno studio sperimentale condotto nel 2023 da EngageMinds Hub, Centro di ricerca in psicologia dei consumi dell’Università Cattolica di Cremona. La professoressa è stata intervistata da Adnkronos nell’ambito del Capalbio Film Festival che, anche quest’anno, ha dedicato una giornata alla sostenibilità
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00:00In fact, the consumer has not heard much about sustainable palm oil. In the research that we have done, we have seen how in fact the consumer today is very sensitized on the subject of palm oil, after which there are no differentiations in its representation of this product.
00:27Of course, talking about sustainability reassures, but behind this word the consumer does not know how to describe what distinguishes this type of production.
00:40The experiment that we have done has shown how to report the label without, in front of a baked product, also associating it not only to palm oil, but to other oils and also to fake ingredients, leads the consumer to perceive that product without as better than the conventional product.
01:00This is how the word without becomes a neuristic, that is, a shortcut of the consumer's thinking, to which today an improvement evaluation of the product is associated.
01:12This not so much on the basis of an objective evaluation of the ingredient that is removed or put, and of what is the nutritional value, the value of sustainability of that product, but simply because, precisely on the basis of the media backlash that has been in the past decade, now the word without leads us to think of eliminating something harmful.
01:39In particular, in the case of palm oil, precisely for the media backlash that has been, there is an even greater sensitization.
01:47Therefore, this study has shown not only the irrationality of our evaluations as consumers, but also and above all the danger of some simplifications, which very often in marketing and in the commercialization of products are made,
02:04because if on the one hand they increase consumption and facilitate the consumer to orient himself, on the other hand in the long term they can create important health problems, because in the experiment we did we put the label without with polyunsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats are very beneficial for our health,
02:26but the consumer, since he saw the word without, has evaluated those products as better than a conventional product. So what I mean is that these heuristics then lead to errors of counterproductive evaluation for our health.