Women prefer diet advice from women: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDNov 18 2010

A new study shows that women do not pay heed to diet advice from men. The study conducted by the Australian National University (ANU) suggests women are more inclined to listen and change their behaviour if the speaker is also female.

According to researcher Tegan Cruwys, from the university’s department of psychology the study involved showing two versions of several fictional public health messages to the over 100 participants. She says in one version a man presents the information and in another a woman presents the same information. Both the men and women delivering messages had similar sort of look. She said, “What we discovered in this research was that women are most persuaded by a healthy eating message when it comes from another woman rather than when it comes from a man.”

She clarified, “They [speakers] were of similar age, they both wore glasses, they were both wearing a lab coat and they were saying the same thing. So there was very little to actually distinguish the speakers.” Although both speakers represented authority figures, the female speaker scored higher than her male counterpart. Explaining the experiment she said, “At the end of our experiment participants could click on a link to find out more about the Government's healthy eating initiative if they were interested… And when they’d heard a healthy eating message from a woman we had about 40 per cent of our participants click on that link…But when they got that exact same message from a man only 8 per cent of our participants clicked on the link.”

Ms Cruwys explains that the content of the message is important when deciding which sex is the most authoritative. Men may be more influential overall but when it comes to gender based issues like eating and weight women prefer their own sex. She added that this may be applied to target public health messages better. “I think that means the Government’s healthy eating initiative needs to be sure [it comes from] a member of the community that it’s targeting, whether that community is Indigenous Australians or women or young people.” On the other hand men like men speaking on gender issues for them like prostate cancer Ms Cruwys said.

The research has been presented as part of National Psychology Week.