Moving for Money

Would you be willing to run around the block each morning in exchange for a free cappuccino or a free ride on the metro? Rewarding people with money increases motivation to exercise, finds a recently published study in Annals of Internal Medicine. During a 13-week intervention, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania managed to motivate their employees to take no less than 7000 steps a day!

Figure 1. Illustration by Iván López Núñez (for Homo Sociabilis)

Food advertisements: do they make you feel hungry, sexy or greedy?

Sex sells, we all know that. Marketing strategists have been using sexually arousing images and messages in advertisements for over decades, most likely having found its roots on tobacco packages in 1885. Food ads often contain sexual elements. Frequently, these ads promote fast foods, such as the ad by Burger King in 2014, but sometimes also healthy products such as the ad for Coca Cola’s new milk Fairlife  (2014). Sexual elements are used in advertisements because they are believed to catch our attention and make us feel positive towards the advertised brand. More importantly, they increase our arousal and thereby motivate us to obtain the advertised product (Reichter, 2002). 

Source: http://articulateyouth.blogspot.be/2014/12/if-you-pitch-it-they-will-eat-it.html