Lucia A. Reisch

University of Cambridge | Cam · Cambridge Judge Business School

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for environmental protection – possibilities that go well beyond the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between environmentally-friendly products or services and alternatives that are potentially damaging to t...

The rise of obesity is one of today's biggest societal challenges. Indeed, the obesity epidemic is not only impairing individuals' lives, but also societies' sustainability, most notably with regard to the social, the cultural and the economic dimension. Thus, to halt obesity has become a goal in several political sustainability strategies. The foc...

Research on the transformation into more sustainable societies is aware of temporal elements of transformation processes. Temporal factors that are particularly relevant for the explanation, modelling and prediction of processes of transformative social change, and for influencing and shaping them include: The triggers of change; the sequence of th...

Food consumption and production contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions , making them crucial entry points for mitigating climate change and maintaining a liveable planet. Over the past two decades, food policy initiatives have explored interventions to reshape production and consumption patterns, focusing on reducing food waste...

We argue for systematically integrating behavioral sciences and urban planning to develop a joint agenda for research and planning practice. By viewing urban form as a critical choice architecture for making people’s choices more climate-friendly, this approach may unlock new pathways for higher liveability of cities.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the food system constitute about one-third of the global total, hence mitigation in this sphere of human activity is a vital goal for research and policy. This study empirically tests the effectiveness of different interventions to reduce the carbon footprint of food choices made on food-delivery apps, using an incenti...

Introduction Recommender systems, digital tools providing recommendations, and digital nudges increasingly affect our lives. The combination of digital nudges and recommender systems is very attractive for its application in preventing overweight and obesity. However, linking recommender systems with personalised digital nudges has a potential yet...

Cities and other human settlements are major contributors to climate change and are highly vulnerable to its impacts. They are also uniquely positioned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead adaptation efforts. These compound challenges and opportunities require a comprehensive perspective on the public policy of human settlements. Drawing on...

Childhood obesity is a complex disorder that appears to be influenced by an interacting system of many factors. Taking this complexity into account, we aim to investigate the causal structure underlying childhood obesity. Our focus is on identifying potential early, direct or indirect, causes of obesity which may be promising targets for prevention...

Background It is unclear whether a hypothetical intervention targeting either psychosocial well-being or emotion-driven impulsiveness is more effective in reducing unhealthy food choices. Therefore, we aimed to compare the (separate) causal effects of psychosocial well-being and emotion-driven impulsiveness on European adolescents’ sweet and fat pr...

The digital environment can pose health risks through exposure to unhealthy content. Yet, little is known about its relation to children’s cognitive functioning. This study investigates the association between digital media (DM) exposure and children’s cognitive functioning. This cross-sectional study is based on examinations of children aged 8–18...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of the global food system, sending shockwaves across countries' societies and economy. This has presented formidable challenges to sustaining a healthy and resilient lifestyle. The objective of this study is to examine the food consumption patterns and assess diet diversity indicators, pri...

The relation between digitalization and environmental sustainability is ambiguous. There is potential of various digital technologies to slow down the transgression of planetary boundaries. Yet resource and energy demand for digital hardware production and use of data-intensive applications is of substantial size. The world over, there is no compre...

This paper explores the application of message framing as a management practice to promote change in employee behaviour for corporate sustainability. We conduct a field experiment in a German automotive company to test the effects of three different frames (emotional, normative and gain) on pro-environmental actions in relation to electric vehicle...

This study used cross-sectional UK Biobank data to estimate the influence of active and passive commuting modes and commuting distance on cardiovascular disease (CVD) -related biomarkers as measures of health outcomes. The analysis applied logistic regression to assess the risk of exhibiting individual biomarker values outside a predefined referenc...

The influence of digitization on sustainable development.

In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges” — approaches to law and policy that maintain freedom of choice, but that steer people in certain directions. Yet to date, there has been little evidence on whether citizens of various societies support nudges and nudging. We report the results of nationally representative surv...

Background: Active mobility and public transport increase physical activity (PA) levels. With varying intensity and effectiveness, European cities implement Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) to spur transport-related PA. Therefore, we aim to examine drivers and barriers to SUMP implementation and assess its influence on PA across European c...

Background: Physical inactivity rates have remained high worldwide since 2001. Public policies are an essential upstream lever to target individual physical activity (PA) behaviour. However, implementers have different strategies and face implementation challenges that are poorly understood. The present study analyzes the implementation processes...

This paper addresses some of the perceptions, beliefs, and experiences related to sustainable consumption habits of citizens of Córdoba (Argentina). We focus on three main areas of consumption: food, housing, and mobility. The study examines the discourses of 59 citizens in seven focus groups with seven to nine persons each. Six groups combine age...

Sustainable entrepreneurship can contribute to sustainable development by seeking synergies between social, environmental and economic outcomes, turning market failures into commercial opportunities. However, institutional conditions often act to obstruct sustainable entrepreneurs. While policy is instrumental in shaping conditions for entrepreneur...

Governments around the world, as well as the European Union and United Nations organisations, are currently putting forward new initiatives to govern digital technologies and media infrastructures. However, most of these policy initiatives disregard the broader implications of digitalisation for environmental sustainability and social justice. This...

It is now widely accepted that a significant portion of emissions reductions required to meet net zero targets must come from individual behaviour change. Shifting consumers towards more sustainable food consumption and avoiding food waste and loss (FWL) have been identified as two key levers to tackle climate change at the individual and household...

Governments around the world, as well as the European Union and United Nations organisations, are currently putting forward new initiatives to govern digital technologies and media infrastructures. However, most of these policy initiatives disregard the broader implications of digitalisation for environmental sustainability and social justice. Thi...

Meat consumption and production cause a significant share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the food sector. Behavioural food policy suggests using defaults-i.e., pre-setting a specific choice option-as an effective demand-side instrument to reduce meat consumption. This systematic review compiles, critically appraises, and synthesises existing...

Knowing the extent to which mental well-being and stressful life events during adolescence contribute to personality characteristics related to risk-taking behaviors, such as emotion-driven impulsiveness, is highly relevant for the development of health promotion measures. This study examined whether psychosocial well-being and different stressful...

Increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in a shift towards more plant-based foods is considered a key component of a healthy and sustainable diet. Recent experimental work suggests that behavioural insights-based interventions in the immediate choice context may create opportunities for sustainable food-behaviour change. Among the many actors an...

A Cohort Causal Graph (CCG) over the life-course from childhood to adolescence is estimated to identify potential causes of obesity and to determine promising targets for prevention strategies. We adapt a popular causal discovery algorithm to deal with missing values by multiple imputation and with temporal cohort structure. To estimate possible ca...

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) is seen as a win–win situation for governments. It is argued that SSB taxes are relatively easy to implement from a practical perspective compared to for example other nutrition policies. However, the implementation of SSB taxation laws does not happen by itself. Therefore, this work examines implementation pr...

Across many parts of the world, people increasingly eat out-of-home. Simultaneously, many people strive to eat a healthier diet, but it remains unclear to what extent and how eating out helps or hinders people in achieving their dietary goals. The present study investigated how characteristics of the physical micro-environment in out-of-home food o...

People making food choices are often exposed to different cues that can activate relevant goals that influence the choice outcome. Hedonic goals are frequently primed by advertising while health policy enlists primes that activate health goals in the moment of food decision-making – e.g., healthy food labels. However, little is known about the effe...

Evening Lecture - Prof. Dr. Lucia Reisch, El-Erian Professor of Behavioural Economics and Policy University of Cambridge: Behavioural Public Policy for Sustainable Development, moderated by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Susanne Augenhofer, LL.M. (Yale)

Evening Lecture held by Prof. Dr. Lucia Reisch on Behavioural Public Policy for Sustainable Development and organised by Prof. Dr. Susanne Augenhofer, LL.M. (Yale) and the European Law Institute, Austrian Hub

Introduction: Over the past decades, children have been increasingly using screen devices, while at the same time their sleep duration has decreased. Both behaviors have been associated with excess weight, and it is possible they act as mutually reinforcing behaviors for weight gain. The aim of the study was to explore independent, prospective ass...

Background Media use may influence metabolic syndrome (MetS) in children. Yet, longitudinal studies are scarce. This study aims to evaluate the longitudinal association of childhood digital media (DM) use trajectories with MetS and its components. Methods Children from Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Sweden participati...

For this study, the authors measured attitudes toward shopping for food and cooking, before and during the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, among a sample of 526 Danish consumers, using an online survey. To analyse changes due to the lockdown, they applied a latent class Markov model, which revealed four states: middle of the road, love...

To mitigate climate change, food systems must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. For consumers, this means switching to more plant-based diets and wasting less food. A behaviorally informed policy employing nudges—educative and architectural—can be a cornerstone. Plant-based defaults promise large reduction effects while maintaining freedom of...

Background Since only few longitudinal studies with appropriate study designs investigated the relationship between objectively measured physical activity (PA) and overweight, the degree PA can prevent excess weight gain in children, remains unclear. Moreover, evidence is limited on how childhood overweight determines PA during childhood. Therefore...

What information would people like to have? What information would they prefer to avoid? How does the provision of information bear on welfare? And what does this mean for food policy? Representative surveys in eleven nations find that substantial percentages of people do not want to receive information even when it bears on health, sustainability,...

Background and Aims Food processing has been indicated as a factor capable of negatively affecting the global food system, including the profile of consumers’ diets. The objectives of the present study were to provide a description of the consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the large population of children, adolescents and adults from ei...

This paper focuses on policies that are enlightened by behavioural insights (BIs), taking decision-makers’ biases and use of heuristics into account and utilising a people-centric perspective and full acknowledgement of context dependency. Considering both the environmental and pandemic crises, it sketches the goal of resilient food systems and des...

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—possibilities that go well beyond, and that may supplement or complement, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between climate-friendly products or services and alternat...

As current action remains insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris agreement let alone to stabilize the climate, there is increasing hope that solutions related to demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation can close the gap. However, given these topics are not investigated by a single epistemic community, the literature ba...

Die Verbraucherpolitik verfügt über ein breites Instrumentarium, bestehend aus weichen Instrumenten wie Information und Beratung, Bildung und Befähigung, Organisation und Ermächtigung sowie harten Instrumenten wie Steuern, Abgaben, Subventionen und der Regulierung durch Recht. In jüngerer Zeit wird verstärkt eine evidenzbasierte Politik angestrebt,...

Um das „Handlungsprinzip Nachhaltigkeit“ zu verstehen und seine Bedeutung für die Verbraucherwissenschaften einschätzen zu können, gibt der vorliegende Beitrag zunächst einen Überblick über die Geschichte und Genese des Konzepts „Nachhaltige Entwicklung“. Anschließend wird das Konzept vertieft und die Debatte über seine Kernelemente skizziert. Als...

Digital media (DM) influences children’s food choice. We aim to investigate associations between DM use and taste preferences (TP) for sweet, fatty, bitter, and salty in European children and adolescents. Individuals aged 6–17 years (N = 7094) providing cross-sectional data for DM use: television (TV), computer/game console (PC), smartphone and int...

This chapter reports the results of nationally representative surveys in fourteen countries, investigating the attitudes of people towards nudges and nudging, with a particular focus on environmental and health nudges. The countries covered are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa,...

Choice is a key concept of our time. It is a foundational mechanism for every legal order in societies that are, politically, constituted as democracies and, economically, built on the market mechanism. Thus, choice can be understood as an atomic structure that grounds core societal processes. In recent years, however, the debate over the right way...

Creating more health-fostering environments is high on the agenda of public and private actors. The behavioral approach to nudge people towards healthier food choices is gaining popularity despite limited understanding about where, and for whom, which specific nudges work. This study contributes by reporting on three different nudging interventions...

Background: During adolescence, health behaviors and weight status are increasingly influenced by friendship and peer networks. This paper examines resemblances in weight-related characteristics and how they differ by sociodemographic factors. Methods: Over 3,000 friendships were reported by 1,603 adolescents, aged 11-16 years, who participated...

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of our food supply. In view of the threats posed by climate change, we must ensure that it is even better equipped to cope with future crises, according to a group of experts at acatech – National Academy of Science and Engineering. The experts recommend the adoption of a sustainab...

Limiting global warming to 2ºC or less relative to pre-industrial temperatures will require unprecedented rates of decarbonization globally. The scale and scope of transformational change required across sectors and actors in society raises critical questions of feasibility. Much of the literature on mitigation pathways addresses technological and...

The present paper focuses on green defaults as demand-side policies supporting the uptake of renewable energy in Germany. It sets out to gain a better understanding of whether and for whom green electricity defaults work. The present study is one of the first to use a large-scale data set to investigate this question. We combine micro-level data fr...

Demand-side policies for mitigating climate change based on behavioral insights are gaining increased attention in research and practice. Here we describe a systematic map that catalogues existing research on behaviorally informed interventions targeting changes in consumer food consumption and food waste behavior. The purpose is to gain an overvie...

The relationship between social vulnerabilities and the effectiveness of behavioral interventions to prevent obesity in children is poorly understood. Therefore, the objective of this study is to evaluate the association between parental employment and the effectiveness of IDEFICS, a multilevel behavioral intervention aiming to prevent obesity amon...