A pretty interesting
insight into weight loss from New Scientist, "Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie - which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option."
I've been thinking a lot about this sort of stuff lately (as I mentioned in
Marketing Health). Clearly compliance is a big issue in health, as is evidenced by the millions of people a year who jump on the latest diet fad only to fall off the wagon within weeks or even days. I've been interested how my awareness of this sort of behavior effects my own attempts to make myself more healthy (for what it's worth, I've been on a health kick for about a month that's stuck so far). This cake study seems to be a similar idea: A reminder of what's motivating you. Now the only question is how do you stop people from building up an immunity to this sort of reminder in the same way we (or I) ignore those emails from
Basecamp after a week of a missed deadlines?