Health Versus Indulgence: How Goal Conflict and Risk Perception Shape Compensatory Health Beliefs in Food Bundles

ABSTRACT Consumers frequently face trade‐offs between immediate indulgence and long‐term health. Prior research has largely examined binary health‐versus‐indulgence choices, leaving unanswered how such conflicts unfold in the more realistic context of mixed food bundles, where healthy and indulgent items co‐occur. Moreover, compensatory health beliefs have typically been treated as a unitary construct, obscuring whether compensation fosters healthier actions versus licenses indulgence. A further ambiguity concerns the conflation of goal conflict with perceived health risk, raising questions about whether risk simply intensifies conflict or operates as a distinct boundary condition. This research addresses these gaps across four experiments. Study 1 shows that greater goal conflict predicts healthier bundle choices. Study 2 demonstrates mediation: immediate compensations encourage healthier selections, whereas future compensations justify indulgence. Study 3 manipulates compensatory orientation, providing causal evidence that the temporal framing of compensation alone shifts bundle choices. Study 4 manipulates perceived health risk and reveals moderation: under low risk, conflict strengthens immediate compensations; under high risk, reliance on delayed compensations is suppressed, leading consumers to adopt healthier bundles directly. The findings contribute theoretically by clarifying the temporal dynamics of compensatory reasoning, positioning risk perception as a boundary condition rather than a proxy for conflict, and reconciling prior inconsistencies. Methodologically, the bundle‐choice paradigm enhances ecological validity beyond binary designs. Practically, the results offer guidance for public health and marketplace interventions by showing when small, real‐time compensations are effective and when stronger risk‐based strategies are required to promote balanced eating.