Informit article: Pavlov’s kids

As the Abbott government acts to close down the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, a statutory body with responsibility to develop policies to address childhood obesity, consumer psychology is providing new insights into how advertising gets kids to eat. This new research is nowhere to be found in the deliberations of Australian policy makers, neither the politicians committed to small government and ‘self-regulation’, nor even those more sympathetic to regulation. Policy making remains weighed down by an antiquated view of how marketing persuades.