Inspire

Do you have a great nudge to improve complementary feeding behaviors?

Nov 04 2020
  • Kristina Granger
    Advisor
    Social and Behavior Change
At a glance

• "Nudges" have been a popular concept for well over a decade in social behavior change - but not so much for complementary feeding

• If you've used nudges to affect nutrition behavior, please share them with us in the comments, or on social media!

The idea of making small changes in “choice architecture” to steer people toward making particular choices – so-called nudges – has seeped into many areas of life and discussions of social behavior change. But not so much for complementary feeding.

A cursory review reveals that the explicit use of nudges for complementary feeding behaviors is exceedingly rare. However, to be fair, referring to “a nudge for complementary feeding” obscures a critical point: complementary feeding is not a single behavior, it’s a complex set of behaviors that change over time, as our “challenges” Inspire piece makes clear.

Consequently, a “nudge for complementary feeding” is not going to be a nudge for complementary feeding – it’s going to be a nudge for a specific feeding behavior at a specific time.

We know nudges in complementary feeding must exist – by definition, nudges are invisible pushes toward certain choices.

What is a nudge?

A “nudge” is an intervention that steers people toward a desired action. Behavioral economists Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler popularized the idea with their book Nudge in 2008, pointing out that we experience nudges routinely in our daily lives: they’re right there, embedded in the “choice architecture” of daily life.

People do not make every decision consciously – we are all guided by a variety of cues in our environment, some obvious and some completely hidden. We can be steered toward certain choices, in a way not unlike what road builders do when they put up guardrails, paint lines on a road and erect signs. But in every situation where we make choices, we experience nudges.

In their book, Sunstein and Thaler, behavioral economists, explained nudges as any aspect of choice architecture that did not force people to make a particular decision – leaving them free to choose, say, an option that many might see as inadvisable – and did not alter their economic incentives. You can read a short summary of the concept here.

Steering people toward particular decisions, they argued, is in the broader public interest: nudges are already there, steering decisions in any situation, their thinking went; so why not harness them to positive effect?

“To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid,” Sunstein and Thaler wrote. “Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” Fortifying foods that people consume regularly, for example fortifying salt with iodine, could be classified as a “nudge” today.

This thinking has led to a variety of efforts to do exactly that. Not long after Nudge was published, Sunstein became the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration. The influence of Nudges similarly has spread and a number of governments and institutions have set up “nudge units”: working groups aimed at leveraging behavioral insights to achieve various ends.

In July, Sunstein was named chair of the World Health Organization’s new technical advisory group on behavioral insights and sciences for health. But it is misleading to call it a nudge unit; nudges are just one technique among many that have emerged from behavioral research. He is, indeed, leading a diverse international multi-disciplinary team that includes anthropologists, neuroscientists, marketing and communications experts, etymologists and behavioral economists, among others.

The idea of nudges “is something people can grab on to,” said Elena Altieri, WHO Technical Officer for Behavioral Insights, who leads the behavioral and social sciences unit and who worked on establishing the working group. She said the working group’s diversity – in terms of geography, gender, and discipline – will allow it to consider a variety of insights and formulate ideas on how to apply them across WHO’s similarly very diverse scope of public health efforts.

“Is there a health topic where behavior does not play a fundamental role in the outcomes we are seeking?” Altieri said. “Behaviors are at the heart. We are complementing what we know about biomedical evidence with behavioral evidence. That’s what we’re advocating for.”

What we want from you

In short, nudges alter the environment so that automatic cognitive processes are triggered to favor a desired outcome. Can nudges be applied to the more complicated behaviors involved in feeding a child?

We turn to you Inspire readers: Have you used nudges in your complementary feeding work? Or have you seen nudges used in other areas that could be used to address a complementary feeding behavior? We hope you will contribute your ideas on social media or in the comments section below. We will compile and evaluate the ideas and then write them up in a future Inspire column.

Use the comments section below to share your ideas or join the conversation on social media using the #Inspire4SBC hashtag.

We’ll compile a list of the nudge ideas we receive and a panel of our experts will decide which are most promising! While we do not have a prize, we urge you to share your ideas for the simple satisfaction of knowing you are helping your fellow nutrition practitioners improve their programs and activities!

Join the Conversation

Submitted by pramila MENON on Fri, 11/06/2020 - 16:34

Permalink

Annaprashan is the ceremony used by many people to start complementary feeding.in Maharashtra we used completion of 6 months is celebrated as half yearly birthday in community to change complementary feeding practices

Submitted by Mansi Shah on Mon, 11/09/2020 - 05:01

Permalink

In home At snack storage counter
All high calorie, sugar food eg cookies chip etc are stored in transparent jars which is visible clearly whenever individual is hungry and are usually first thing to grab
Instead of it transparent jars could be fill with healthy snacks like dry fruits, Makhana, peanuts, chana etc. and high calorie ,sugar can be stored in opaque containers
Thus subconsciously acting on nudges& choice of architects

Submitted by Marcia Griffiths on Wed, 03/31/2021 - 19:09

Permalink

Encouraging caregivers to feed young children from a separate bowl is a powerful nudge to appropriately feeding. Based on research with caregivers that identified the need, and then the design of the bowl, The Manoff Group developed a bowl specifically for young children. The bowl is specially marked with measurements corresponding to the correct amount of food that young children should be given according to their age and has handles as caregivers requested for feeding and to hang it after washing. This locally-produced technology has been introduced in six Latin American countries and recently in Zambia. Caregivers report that their children learned the bowl was theirs and they would point to it when they wanted to eat, reminding the caregiver.

Submitted by Hui Juan Wong on Wed, 03/31/2021 - 19:09

Permalink

For my family, I would says that let the child observed and monitoring us at meal time before they started solid at six months is a nudge for kick start their complementary feeding around 6 months. Responsive feeding, eyes to eyes contact, interactive session at meals all contribute to a structure meal routines for the young ones.

Restricted HTML

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <h6 id>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
 
Newsletter