The illusion of calorie fluency: How metacognitive uncertainty leads to less extreme healthiness perceptions of foods

Deidre Popovich and Ryan Hamilton

Journal of Retailing, 2025, vol. 101, issue 3, 331-347

Abstract: Calorie information is frequently displayed in retail settings where food items are purchased, including grocery stores, hypermarkets, restaurants, cafés, convenience stores, and specialty shops. Some types of retailers are legally required to display calorie counts on packaging, menus, or menu boards. Conventional wisdom suggests that as people become more exposed to calorie information, they will make more informed choices and will be better able to judge the healthiness of foods. This research proposes a more nuanced influence of calorie information on consumers’ food evaluations. Specifically, this research hypothesizes that consumers are often overly confident in their ability to use calories to evaluate foods, an illusory fluency that is likely the result of the ubiquity of calorie information. Consistent with this illusory fluency account, this research finds that when consumers attempt to use calorie information in an evaluation or estimation task, the result can create metacognitive uncertainty, resulting in more moderate (i.e., less extreme) evaluations of the healthiness of foods. After trying to utilize their calorie knowledge in judgments or evaluations, consumers subsequently evaluate unhealthy foods as healthier, and healthy foods as less healthy. Nine experiments support the prediction that metacognitive uncertainty in the usage of calorie information in judgments can lead to more moderate evaluations of the healthiness of foods, and less healthy food choices.

Keywords: Calories; Nutrition; Food; Perceived healthiness; Metacognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435925000284
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jouret:v:101:y:2025:i:3:p:331-347

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretai.2025.04.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Retailing is currently edited by A. Roggeveen

More articles in Journal of Retailing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().