Another Kind of Self-Regulation

Robert emailed me the link to this article about industry self-regulation of fast food marketing to children. 

To me, the funniest part of it was the author citing the Catholic church as an authority on the age at which kids develop the ability to reason.  (He also links to the UNESCO child learning web pages, though not to anything that specifically addresses this issue).  Too bad there is no systematic scientific inquiry into such questions, a field like "psychology" or something, because it would be possible, I think, for such scientists to empirically investigate such issues and then disseminate their results so that other people would know about them.

A sad part of all this emphasis on "What do kids know and when do they know it?" is that there is often an assumption that once children are old / cognitively developed enough to "reason," to recognize selling or persuasive intent, or whatever developmental milestone is selected, they will have a robust cognitive defense against these marketing ploys.  But conscious awareness isn't itself all that great of a protection against influence.  While people continue to argue over the plausibility of "subliminal advertising," effective marketing techniques dependent on implicit attitude change, prime-to-action effects, etc., are regularly employed among adults as well as kids.  In addition, there is a large literature on third-person effects in persuasion - the tendency for people to believe that others are more influenced by persuasive communications than they are themselves. And people with high levels of defensive confidence have been shown to willingly expose themselves to more counterattitudinal information, which does change their attitudes.

This being said, I think the McDonald's rant was way overblown.  For example, I don't see any basis for the author suggesting that of course no kid who was not "bioengineered" would ever willingly ask for apple dippers and caramel sauce rather than french fries.  (He offers evidence that McD employees automatically include fries with the Happy Meal 90% of the time, but that doesn't speak very directly to the claim he's making.)  And what does he mean by bioengineered anyway?  (I want somebody to go neuroscience on this guy's ass.)

Robert made the amusing but awesome suggestion that McDonald's should start selling the toy from the Happy Meal independent of the food for the same price.  Imagine: Parents who don't have the will to resist the nagging from their kids about the latest crappy plastic little cartoon-movie tie-in but who are concerned about their kid being obese by age 8 can just buy the toy separately.  (My former principles of marketing professor was in this category; his kid nagged incessantly for Happy Meals but wouldn't even touch the food most of the time - he just wanted the trinket.)