Food for life: Cultivating, sustaining and transforming
Mindsets matter: Click-worthy foods on social media
Culture
Mindsets matter: Click-worthy foods on social media
When viewing food posts on social media, do you find yourself clicking on sweet treats and salty snacks instead of vegetable-based dishes? If so, you're not alone, according to research by Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) marketing professor Matthew Philp. We subconsciously know the value of gooey cheese and flaky crusts – they taste good. But when it comes to vegetables or other healthier snacks, our brains need to work harder to find the value. This influences how viewers engage with food-based content.
To explain the difference in engagement, professor Philp began by investigating how nutrition influences social media engagement. He examined hundreds of cooking videos posted to Facebook by Tasty, a food-focused enterprise of the digital media company Buzzfeed. Each video was analyzed for markers of engagement, including likes, shares and views, and for nutritional values, such as protein, sugar and saturated fat. Professor Philp and the research team found caloric density can positively influence social media engagement. The researchers concluded that the more calorically dense food videos engaged viewers’ affective state, or emotional response, and made them excited about the food and more likely to engage with the content.
In a follow-up study, the researchers set out to investigate how to boost social media engagement with less calorie-dense food. They examined if changing viewers’ mindsets from instinctual (affective) to intentional (calculative) would make it easier to see the value of more nutritious foods and motivate people to engage with such content, testing more than 200 participants and calculative mindsets. The calculative mindset groups answered a short list of basic math questions before viewing the content. Participants filled out a five-item measure of how likely they were to engage with the content, as well as a four-item affective state scale. The researchers found that a calculative mindset increased participants' engagement with the more nutritious food content.
“A lot of social media is driven by what people engage with,” said professor Philp, explaining social media platforms push content with high engagement to more people and suppress content with low engagement. The engagement with less healthy content encourages food producers and media companies to post more content featuring food that is often less nutritious or unhealthy. This could have a negative impact on diet and eating habits.
“If I’m only seeing calorie-dense meals on social media, I’m going to have a distorted perception of what food is liked and enjoyed by other people in society,” said professor Philp. “I might think I should be eating more salads and vegetables, but then on social media, calorie-dense food is all I see, and I start to think this might be normal.”
Both of professor Philp’s studies support the idea that eating habits are an instinctual, reflexive behaviour, and our unconscious responses to food stimuli are consistent in digital environments. While engagement may be driven by these unconscious responses, the research suggests it is possible to use mindset interventions to overcome consumer instincts.
Professor Philp will continue to explore food, social media and consumer behaviour with two new research projects examining how photos and videos of food posted to social media can influence food enjoyment and restaurant sales.
If I'm only seeing calorie-dense meals on social media, I'm going to have a distorted perception of what food is liked and enjoyed by other people in society.
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.