["Nudges": relevance, limitations and ethical issues, specifically in health policy]

The concept of "nudge" has recently spread accross the field of research that addresses the issue of health behaviours change. According to Thaler and Sunstein (2008) a nudge is "any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives". Similar concepts, such as persuasive technology or manipulation, have been studied for decades in the fields of design, psychology or communication. The novelty of the concept of "nudge"' lies in its particular political purpose, namely libertarian paternalism. Meanwhile, the analysis of the decision process induced by a nudge shows that it does not simply amount to a change in the environment and that its handling is ethically tricky. The main interest of this concept might actually lie in a better assessment and a better regulation of the public health impact of choice architecture for economic purposes, such as marketing and advertising.

Why people drink shampoo? Food Imitating Products are fooling brains and endangering consumers for marketing purposes

A Food Imitating Product (FIP) is a household cleaner or a personal care product that exhibits food attributes in order to enrich consumption experience. As revealed by many cases worldwide, such a marketing strategy led to unintentional self-poisonings and deaths. FIPs therefore constitute a very serious health and public policy issue. To understand why FIPs are a threat, we first conducted a qualitative analysis on real-life cases of household cleaners and personal care products-related phone calls at a poison control center followed by a behavioral experiment. Unintentional self-poisoning in the home following the accidental ingestion of a hygiene product by a healthy adult is very likely to result from these products being packaged like foodstuffs. Our hypothesis is that FIPs are non-verbal food metaphors that could fool the brain of consumers. We therefore conducted a subsequent functional neuroimaging (fMRI) experiment that revealed how visual processing of FIPs leads to cortical taste inferences. Considered in the grounded cognition perspective, the results of our studies reveal that healthy adults can unintentionally categorize a personal care product as something edible when a food-like package is employed to market nonedible and/or dangerous products. Our methodology combining field (qualitative) and laboratory (behavioral and functional neuroimaging) findings could be of particular relevance for policy makers, as it can help screening products prior to their market release – e.g. the way they are packaged and how they can potentially confuse the mind of consumers – and therefore save lives.