https://researchopenworld.com/pasta-messaging-food-and-inner-beauty-together-an-experiment-in-cognitive-economics/#

Abstract

We present a new approach to design foods at the conceptual stage. The approach mixes and matches ideas about the food using experimental design, presents these combinations of ideas, and instructs respondents to rate the combinations. The approach forces respondents to make trade-offs among different aspects, but at an almost unconscious level. What emerges is a sense of what specifically is important, as well as the existence of two or more different mind-sets. The approach efficiently screens through ideas at low cost, producing both information for decisions, and archival, intellectual property for ongoing business and scientific efforts. Introduction The world of commercial food has evolved from staples to a myriad of assorted flavors of different, common foods, such as pasta sauces, mustards, teas. Indeed, there is a so-called ‘paradox of choice’ emerging, wherein the consumer is bombarded with so many alternatives of a product, often touted as ‘new and different,’ that the consumer withdraws to a limited set of alternatives of a product, flavors, textures, i.e., different SKU’s (shop-keeping units) in the language of the retail trade. Schwartz, 2004 [1]. Beyond the different flavors lies the whole new world of ‘food as medicine.’ These are so-called nutraceutical foods, foods which are good-for-you, and good tasting. We are not talking here of supplements which are not foods, but rather foods touted as having some health-benefits. Scarcely a day goes without one or another food being ‘discovered’ to be good for one or another condition which ails humans. The story changes as well. One day caffeine in coffee is bad. Another day, someone finds that daily cups of coffee are actually good for one’s heart [2] A newly emerging trend is food as a promoter of beauty, so-called ‘beauty from within’ (Tabor and Blair, 2009.) The ingoing notion is that by eating the right foods, one can become beauty. The beauty can be achieving the proper weight, or having a beautiful skin, and so forth. Beauty from within is an attractive idea, combining as it does the desire to eat ‘well’ and to ‘look well,’ certainly a powerful combination. A lot of the work on ‘good for-you-foods’ is reported in newsletters, from stories released for the public by companies. The expectation is that these stories somehow will be ‘picked up,’ and enter the minds of the public, not so much as an isolated factoid whose origin is well known, but rather as something which will seep into one’s mind to become simply a ‘fact’ of the world, the way ‘things are.’ There are papers in refereed scientific journals, but the scientific community and certainly the world of reputable scientific publications has no fighting chance against the tidal wave of food claims, especially food claims which are technically ‘legal,’ at least on the surface, and do not seem to have anything to do with so-called ‘fake news,’ even ‘fake nutrition news.’ The contribution of Mind Genomics and Cognitive Economics to understanding the nutraceutical aspects of pasta From the above-mentioned discussion of the food in the light of claims, it makes eminent sense to study how PEOPLE respond to what is claimed. Do the claims convince? Are they Believable? Will people pay for these claims? Our focus is pasta, a very popular food, eaten around the world in different forms, a long-term staple, and a food that can modified in many ways to appeal to consumers, whether in terms of taste, health, versatility, and so forth. Just think, about the popularity of mac n cheese among children, and at the same time the pastas served at high end restaurant. It should be no surprise that in Google Scholar®, there are 33,000+ citations for pasta and consumer benefits. [3,4] Howard Moskowitz (2019) Pasta... Messaging Food and Inner Beauty Together... an Experiment in Cognitive Economics Nutr Res Food Sci J, Volume 2(1): 2–14, 2019 By presenting the issue of nutraceutical claims in terms of belief and dollar value, we move out of the world of nutrition and food science, and into the world of consumer research. Our focus is not on what is true ‘scientifically,’ but rather what is believed to be true. Can we discover what is believed to be true, and move out from that to understand, possibly, what about the message itself might drive this belief? While we are doing so, we might even discover different groups of people, different ‘Mind-Sets,’ or ways of looking at the same messages, so one Mind-Set might believe certain types of messages, and not others, whereas a second-mind set might believe different messages. The same might hold for the dollar value of these messages. The science to help us address these issues of belief and monetary value is a newly-emerging field of consumer science and psychology known as Mind Genomics. The premise of Mind Genomics is that for every topic of experience where judgment is called for, e.g., belief in claims, there are a small number of groups of ideas which move together. There may be one, two, three, four, or perhaps even five or more of these groups of ideas, known as Mind-Sets. The Mind-Set can be likened, metaphorically, the three basic colors, red, yellow, and blue. At any one time a person is presumed to hold one Mind-Set, one mental genome, one set of primary ideas for a topic area [5,6]. In contrast to color primaries and physical genes, Mind-Sets are constructed on an ad hoc basis, looking at the pattern of responses to a set of related ideas, these ideas in our case dealing with the nutritional and health aspects of pasta. The Mind-Sets emerge from a statistical process, clustering, so that people showing the same pattern of responses to a set of elements are presumed to hold the same Mind-Set. Moving beyond Mind Genomics we have the topic of perceived subjective value. What is the respondent will to pay for these features and benefits of a pasta which is ‘good for you?’ Will the respondent simply pay more for the pasta she or he likes? Or does homo economicus, economic man, the part of our mind dealing with price, somehow obey different rules? When we introduce economics, price, we introduce a new factor, a new consideration. We are asking the respondent to tell us what something is worth, a more rational decision than simply do you like what you read. In previous studies by author HRM it continued to emerge that homo economicus was more conservative than homo emotionalis, the evaluation of liking. We explore the subjective value by a newly emerging tool from the world of behavioral economics. Rather than asking the respondent how much she or he would pay for the product, we present the product as an offering from a company and ask how many shares of the company the respondent feels that he would purchase, based upon what was just presented in the test vignette (Mind Genomics terms for the test concept.) The approach is called predictive markets. In many applications, the respondent is given actual money to invest. In our study, predictive markets are simply another way of assigning a dollar value to the business proposition described by the vignette. Approach Mind Genomics proceeds in a systematic fashion to understand the way people make decisions. The process, explained in expanded form below, mixes ideas, presents these mixtures as vignettes, obtains responses to the vignettes, and deconstructs the responses to the part-worth contribution of each idea. The result reveals the internal weights used by the respondent to make judgments, whether these be judgments of believability or judgments of price willing to pay. 1. The raw materials. The first step acquires the raw materials, the specific messages. The messages are categorized into silos. Table 1 shows the set of six silos, each silo having six elements (messages). We have edited the names of the silos so that they are questions. This editing is done for didactic reasons, to make the process more Socratic, more tutorial. By asking questions and giving answers, the user begins to think in a more structured fashion, making further studies easier when one uses Mind Genomics as the investigatory tool. The elements were generated according to author Batalvi’s approach, called the 5-Keys (Batalvi, Personal Communication, 2011.) The 5-key method, used in Batalvi’s psychotherapy work, allows the therapist to understand the way a therapy client ‘thinks’ about a certain problem. It was Batalvi’s suggestion to use 5-Keys as an organizing principle to identify the key dimensions for a product experience. The Test Vignettes Mind Genomics works by combining the elements (Table 1) into short, easy-to-read combinations called test vignettes. Figure 1A presents one of the vignettes, showing the combination, and the rating scale at the bottom. The rating scale, discussed below, deals with believability Figure 1B shows the same vignette, i.e., the exact same combination, but with the second question, on amount willing to pay, expressed as shares that one would invest. The vignette presents the respondent with a set of different elements, selected from the set of elements in Table 1. The elements are presented as centered, with no effort made to connect the phrases. The ingoing approach of Mind Genomics is that the respondent searches through the vignette to find the relevant information to make their judgment, the nature of that judgment defined by the rating scale. Underneath the vignettes lies an experimental design, a specific ‘menu’ of combinations. For this study the experimental design is known, in Mind Genomics terms, as ‘6 × 6’, meaning 6 silos (questions) × 6 element/silo (answers), i.e., 36 input elements. These 36 elements are combined into short, easy-to-read vignettes. The 6x6 design specifies a precise set of 48 vignettes, 36 vignettes comprising four elements, and 12 vignettes comprising three elements. No more than one element may appear from any silo, but with the maximum of four elements per vignette, and