Exploring a New Role for Identity in Health Behaviors

Telling the difference would be essential for identifying the right target for health information campaigns. Should they aim at changing individuals’ behavior, advising them to avoid Western food, or should the target be the food industry and its production methods? Prof. Etilé will work out the answer by analyzing data for China and Indonesia obtained through nutritional, health and household budget surveys and scanner data tracking purchases over time. Of course, many factors can explain changing food habits, like prices and environmental impacts on the food supply. To isolate the possible role of an evolving food culture, he will make use of data on other phenomena, like internal migrations that bring people from different cultural backgrounds into the same economic and food environment.

Cultural forces and social identity may interact to change food habits; what if we could actively change dimensions of our personal identity to favor more healthful behavior? In contrast to economists’ treatment of the subject up until now, Prof. Etilé believes that our personal identity changes over time. This could explain why we make certain health-related decisions that won’t be in our best interest down the road, like young people taking up smoking and people in their 60s resisting the dependency insurance they’re bound to need in their 80s. The second goal of Prof. Etilé’s project is to help explain risky behaviors like these and explore how they might be predicted. Through economic and psychometric lab experiments with subjects in France, he aims to develop a measure of the connectedness between our present and future selves, helping to open “the black box of identity”. The dual challenge, he says, will be to measure identity and to succeed in making people think about changing theirs.

Both angles of Prof. Etilé’s research could lead to better strategies for the prevention of risky health behaviors. This could happen, in the first case, thanks to understanding the interaction of technology, food cultures, social identity and health; and in the other, through mapping out the connections between one’s personal identity today and tomorrow. As he says, “This could lead to designing policy interventions that make people think about who they would like to be in the future.”

Scientific title : Identity and Health Behaviours

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