Health Politics

After reading about self-experimentation on Seth Roberts's blog, I've been thinking about the connections between self-experimentation and self-efficacy. Self-experimentation presupposes that it's possible to change one's circumstances, and before starting any self-experiment, the "subject" needs to believe that it's theoretically possible for them to change their circumstances and needs to put serious thought into the reasons for their problems and possible solutions, already more than most people do.

Take the perennial problem of the graduate student: procrastination. Nearly all graduate students and many academics procrastinate: e.g., the dead professor whose desk I used while researching quantum computing made small sculptures from paperclips and dental floss. Some view procrastination as an inevitable and discouraging part of academia, but it's also possible to try to find solutions and feel in better control. Viewing procrastination as an area of self-experimentation (as Seth Roberts discusses in his blog), that forces the subject-investigator to formulate potential solutions, try them one at a time, give them a shot at working, and assess them.

It seems to me that any reasonable intervention to improve procrastination in which a protocol is followed would improve procrastination: most of the problem with procrastination is that it's mindless, disordered, and makes people feel helpless. Following any experimental protocol is a step in the right direction, and if people start to believe that the intervention works, their feelings of self-efficacy could snowball as they begin to truly believe that they have control over a part of their life which felt disordered.

As I enter my final semester of graduate school and think about the work habits that I would like to improve, and the interventions that I would attempt, it seems that anything including watching Eretz Nehederet or dancing to a hip-hop song after writing a certain number of pages or taking a 15 minute walk first thing in the morning could work, as long as I put enough effort to increase my sense of self-efficacy.

New York City has recently required restaurants with uniform menus to post calorie content on their menus with a font size equal to the prices. This initiative may not decrease obesity, but if we're able to gather good data, posting calories on menus could help us better understand how people choose food.

Currently, we don't have a good understanding of how people choose what they eat. Observations of people's food choices through nutritional surveys and food diaries tell us only what people will admit to eating. Laboratory experiments tell us how people who volunteer for psychology experiments choose foods in a new environment, but may not generalize to larger populations in real life situations. Non-laboratory experiments with vending machines have found that people will buy more healthy foods when healthy food is "subsidized" and when less healthy food is "taxed", but nutritional information is not immediately available to subjects even in these experiments: the foods which were manipulated were pretty obvious candidates for healthy and unhealthy foods such as carrot sticks and potato chips.

We also don't know how much knowledge about food people have: when someone chooses a high calorie food, we don't know whether they have chosen that food in ignorance of its calorie content or despite its calorie content. Putting calories on the menu in a visible way gives consumers information which is more readily available than on food packages, and reduces the second problem: some people will read the calorie content of their food when making their choices, and the calorie content may influence their choices.

If calorie information becomes widespread, we could even begin to discuss an elasticity of demand according to both the price and calorie content of the food, as well as a willingness to pay for fewer calories. Just thinking about the McDonald's menu, people can minimize the number of calories they eat by choosing either the least expensive (basic hamburger + fries) or the most expensive items on the menu (salads, grilled chicken).

Some have speculated that posting calorie information on the menus won't affect behavior at all because people choosing to eat at places with unhealthy food can't expect lower calories, but that seems naive. After all, even people shopping at expensive stores are somewhat price sensitive, and all retailers go to lengths to make people feel as though they are getting a bargain.

The inclusion of calorie information on menus gives a tremendous opportunity for social scientists, if only we can get sales data suitable for a quasi-experiment (pre-post with control). Any ideas?

Original copy w comments

I've been inspired lately by the high-quality blogs around me: yesterday I read a random selection from James Grimmelmann's six years of blogging, so decided to dust off this device originally for helping me study for generals.

Andrew Gelman wrote this April about his friend Seth Roberts's diet book. The theory is that eating flavorless foods makes your brain less interested in eating, so you're less hungry, as is described with high-tech graphics in this CBC mini-documentary on the diet. Seth is a Berkeley psychologist who does self-experimentation in his spare time: lately, he seems to be researching methods for overcoming procrastination through structured procrastination.

I'm not used to the idea of drinking oil, but I'm about to go traveling for 3 weeks without kitchen access. Oil and water are plentiful and cheap, as long as I bring a tablespoon to measure the oil. In keeping with the self-experimentation ethic, I want to produce some data. I can't travel with a scale, but measuring tapes are light. Look for dimensionless scatterplots at the beginning of February!

P.S. I suspect that there is a strong element of self-selection in this self-experimentation business. The people who are absolutely nauseated at the idea of oil or sugar water, who find that they are actually nauseated by oil or sugar water, will never stay long enough to register even as a failed diet participant.