We don't make decisions based absolutely on what we want – school children and fruit show us proof

Marlene Schwartz is the Deputy Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She took on a problem that the United States’ National School Lunch Program (sic) had been trying to solve since 1947: to ensure that American schoolchildren have access to a nutritionally balanced and affordable lunch.

For 60 years they’ve been trying. And failed.

American schoolchildren were malnourished in 1947 because of a lack of calories. By 2007 – sixty years later – American schoolchildren were still malnourished despite having access to vast quantities of calories. Why? Because the consumption of nourishing foods like fruits and vegetables was considerably lower than needed. A school district’s Health Advisory Committee had a hunch how they could increase the nutritional intake of pupils.

They thought they could they solve this problem simply by asking a question.

They drafted in Marlene Schwartz to run the test. Two schools were selected. Each with the same options on the school dinner menu:

• Fruit
• Fruit juice

She asked one school to have the dinner ladies say nothing, and the other school have the dinner ladies ask every pupil ‘Would you like fruit or fruit juice with your lunch?’ A simple, innocuous question to the uninitiated, however it is a frame that bounds choice; It is more effortful to consider options other than those presented (such as, ‘neither’). Without the question, 60% of pupils took a serving of fruit or fruit juice. With the question, 90% of schoolchildren took a serving of fruit or fruit juice.

Success?

The experiment could’ve ended there. But the behaviour they wanted to test was the amount of fruit eaten, not the amount of fruit chosen. Here’s the interesting bit: once the fruit was on the tray it was eaten in the same proportion in both schools.

That means that nearly 70% of pupils ate fruit at lunch when asked ‘Would you like fruit or fruit juice?’ compared to fewer that 40% of the pupils in the no-question school.

We don’t make decisions based absolutely on what we want – we make decisions based on what is offered.

Juicy data.

Image by valeria_aksakova on Freepik