An ounCe oF PReVentIon, An APPLe A DAY Effects of Consumers’ Lay Theories on Health-Related Behaviors

Over 300 million people worldwide are obese (WHO 2010), including over 34 percent of the American adult population (Ogden et al. 2007). As these numbers grow ever faster every year and as people correspondingly succumb to health-related problems, the topic of health maintenance has become increasingly important and has begun to attract corresponding attention from consumer researchers (Agrawal, Menon, and Aaker 2007; Chandran and Menon 2004). A major focus of this scholarly attention has been on factors that lead individuals to overindulge in unhealthy behaviors instead of restraining themselves and making healthy choices. These include factors as disparate as social influence (McFerran et al. 2010), regulatory focus (Sengupta and Zhou 2007), and recollections of prior instances of indulgence or restraint (Mukhopadhyay, Sengupta, and Ramanathan 2008). Concomitant with this seemingly diverse set of factors, one area of investigation has demonstrated reliable and strong evidence of influence on health-related behaviors. This is the study of consumers' lay theories. Lay theories, also referred to as naive beliefs or implicit theories, have been shown to influence health-related goal setting and striving (Mukhopadhyay and Johar 2005), perceptions of taste versus healthiness (Raghunathan, Naylor and Hoyer 2006), and even parents' choices of foods for their children (Mukhopadhyay and Yeung 2010). The aim of this chapter is to detail these and other related advances in our understanding of how consumers' lay theories influence their health-related judgments and behaviors. Lay theories are basic assumptions that ordinary people hold about themselves and their world (Dweck 1996; Wyer 2004). Consumer research has extensively studied lay theories as manifested in decision-making biases (Tversky and Kahne-man 1974), expectancy disconfirmation–based product satisfaction (Oliver 1980), and beliefs regarding the association between price and quality (Rao and Monroe 1988). However, till recently, far less attention had been paid to lay theories in