Too (m)eat or not too (m)eat
Creators: name: Picard, Julien
name: Banerjee, Sanchayan
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
subject: Social Work
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: Economics
subject: Environmental Studies
subject: Agricultural and Resource Economics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Food Studies

description: Meat-based diets are carbon intensive. Livestock farming contributes to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Gerber et al., 2013). In the United Kingdom, the livestock sector represents approximately 5 percent of its annual emissions. Consequently, reducing meat consumption offers potential mitigation opportunities to tackle the climate crisis. Yet, the adoption of sustainable diets is challenging. Diets are primarily determined by physiological needs; besides sociological, psychological, and economic factors, which often act as barriers to altering these preferences (Rozin, 1996, Stoll-Kleemann and Schmidt, 2017). 
While there is emerging evidence on the role of these factors in influencing food choices, our understanding of how they interact is limited, at best. In this study, we evaluate the potential conflicts between environmental preferences and cultural habits when making food choices. While raising environmental consciousness makes meat-based diets increasingly unacceptable, meat is an essential part of English dietary habits. Besides the cognitive burden of changing individual habits, dietary changes are often complicated as consuming meat is the product of cultural norms: it often amounts to signaling an attachment to one’s social group (Higgs 2015). We posit that cultural norms represent hindrances to adopting low-carbon diets, and that the strength of such hindrances depends on people’s social demographic profiles. Following Banerjee and John (2021), we further posit that behavioural interventions inducing people to reflect on their decisions can lead to a persistent adoption of sustainable diets among some of these profiles.
To investigate these questions, we design a survey experiment that resembles an online food delivery. Studying environmentally sustainable dietary choices in this context is relevant for four reasons. First, in Western European cultures, eating or ordering at a restaurant is often considered as a special occasion where environmental concerns are secondary for dietary choices (e.g., Biermann and Rau, 2020). Second, as pointed by White (2018), the immediate pleasure of eating often outweigh long-term dietary goals. Therein, it might be easier to constrain one’s future self into a specific diet by only buying specific items at the grocery than it is in a restaurant where the ordering decision is almost immediately followed by consumption. Preference for low-carbon diets may thus be even more time-inconsistent in restaurants (Laibson, 1997). Third, the knowledge and mental barriers regarding how to cook low-carbon meals are not present in a restaurant setting, making this choice environment conducive to using behavioural interventions for promoting low-carbon diets. Fourth, ordering food online has become increasingly prevalent in the UK, while, at the same time, constituting an ideal setting for using such interventions to promote low-carbon food choices.
We will administer an online survey experiment to a sample of 5,552 respondents in Great Britain. The experiment will follow a 2×4 factorial design with two main dimensions. The first dimension encompasses two conditions corresponding to two different menus displayed to respondents. Namely, they will be randomly allocated to either a cultural condition where the titles of the food items contained in the menu refer to traditional British specialties, or a neutral condition with a descriptive menu. Following the literature on habit formation, we assume that priming respondents with cultural names is likely to trigger habits induced behaviours. The second dimension encapsulates three types of behavioural interventions, plus a control group. The first behavioural intervention consists in displaying the social norm message: “In 2021, a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that an increasing number of people in the UK are switching to more climate-friendly diets. Adopting climate-friendly diets means choosing food items which have low greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, from 2008 to 2019, people living in the UK reduced their daily consumption of meat by 17% on average.” In the second behavioural intervention arm, respondents are shown the same message and then asked to report the extent to which they are trying to change their diets to make it more climate friendly. Finally, in the third intervention arm, respondents are additionally given the choice to undertake a self-commitment pledge following reflection on the social norm message using their personal norms.
More precisely, we seek to make three contributions to the scholarly literature of applied environmental and behavioural economics and public policy. First, we will determine whether it is harder to promote the adoption of low-carbon diets when the available options are made more familiar, as such increasing the likelihood to make a choice out of habits, compared to when the available options are presented in a neutral way to decision-makers. More generally, this question will help us explore how factors that are supposed to be orthogonal to pro-environmental decisions can influence the effectiveness of behavioural interventions promoting such decisions. Here, we posit that food choices will be more likely to be made out of habits when facing food items that are part of one’s culture, therefore making the adoption of environmentally sustainable diet more complicated. Second, we assess if inducing respondents to reflect on their dietary choices changes the effectiveness of social norm messages. Third, we evaluate indirect behavioural spillover effects triggered by our treatments. By assessing these spillover effects, we seek to shed light on the cognitive processes these treatment interventions trigger.