Every time you enter the supermarket, you're being manipulated. By design, all of the basics you're just dropping by to pick up lie on the far side of a sea of temptation: the eggs, milk, and bread are blocked by fruit snacks, those fancy new chips, and a display of artisanal beef jerky. If that wasn’t enough, your kids are targets too: all the cereal at the eye level of a child sitting in a shopping cart is pasted with cartoon blandishments, the better to lure them in with.

But could we be manipulated for the better? The average food manufacturer has little reason to divert us from their high-fat, high-sugar, high-deliciousness products. Yet given that we are already being influenced, one can wonder whether stores might eventually see the benefit – perhaps administered through public health-related tax cuts – to making the produce section into a wonderland that has the kids screaming for kale.

Even within our current stores, it isn't difficult to nudge people in a better direction, at least in the short term. Esther Papies, a professor of social psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, found that handing out recipe flyers at a store entrance that included words like "healthy" and "low-calorie" caused people who were overweight or dieting to subconsciously buy fewer snacks. They took a whopping 75% fewer snack items to the checkouts than those who received the control flier, which did not have the health-related terms on it. Seeing those words – being primed by them – activated people's existing goals and reminded them what they could do now to meet them, without the shoppers really taking notice, says Papies.

Other tricks have been proposed by Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behaviour at Cornell who's well known for his research into the psychology of eating. Some of his latest work takes an earlier finding – that people increase their fruit and vegetable intake by 24% if they are told that half of their dinner plate should be reserved for these foods – and applies it to supermarket shopping. Wansink found that dividing a grocery cart in two, with half to be used only for fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat, causes people to spend more than twice as much on fruits and vegetables than people without a partition – $3.65 versus $1.82 on fruits and $5.19 versus $2.17 on vegetables. The idea is that the partition implies the existence of a social norm that consumers try to meet.

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每每進超市，你都被操控。你本來是來買雞蛋、牛奶、面包這些必需品的，但是超市將這些東西都設計在很遠的地方，要買到它們，你必須穿過無數誘惑：果蔬小吃、新款薯片、手工牛肉干擺放區。如果這樣你都無動于衷，那還有你的孩子：坐在購物車里的孩子平視之處就是谷類食品，上面的卡通圖案就像在“召喚”他們。

但我們能不能被操控著去買更健康的食物呢？生產商沒有理由勸我們不買大眾偏愛的高脂、高糖、高香精食品。但既然我們已經被影響了，有人就想了，店家最終能否看清個中利益呢——或許，公眾健康類稅收優惠是個解決之道——把食品區變成一個樂園，讓每個孩子都爭著搶著要甘藍菜。

至少短期來看，即使在目前的商店內，要把顧客引往健康食品區也不是太難。荷蘭烏得勒支大學（Utrecht University）社會心理學教授埃斯特·佩皮斯（Esther Papies）發現，在商店入口發放印有“健康”和“低卡路里”字樣的食譜傳單，能讓超重和節食人群下意識地少買些零食。比起那些拿到未印有健康信息傳單的人來說，前者少買了75%的零食。佩皮斯說，看看這些詞的魔力，它能潛移默化地激勵人們從現在做起，提醒他們努力實現目標。

因研究飲食心理而聞名的康奈爾大學消費者行為學教授布萊恩·文森克（Brian Wansink）也揭秘了一些小伎倆。他近期的一些研究也用到了早期的發現——如果告訴消費者，他們的餐盤要留一半放水果和蔬菜，人們會多吃24%的果蔬——超市購物亦是如此。文森克發現，將購物車一分為二，其中一半規定只能放水果、蔬菜、奶制品和肉制品，此類消費者會比一般人多買一倍多的水果蔬菜——水果：$3.65比$1.82，蔬菜：$5.19比$2.17。秘訣就是，劃分讓消費者覺得這是一種社會規范，他們就會盡量去做到。