## 2 Materials and Methods
### Data Construction Strategies  
We chose a mixed-method approach to discover the structure and content of the social representation of 'cultured meat' for each social group, following the structural approach [29; 30; 31; 32; 33; 34; 35]. Within this theoretical framework, to arrive at the significant elements of the social representation of 'cultured meat' and to reconstruct the organization of these elements, we chose the method of hierarchical evocation [28; 36; 37]. In other words, we asked participants to respond to a task of free association and hierarchization, as provided by [PERSON] method. This is a free association task starting with an inductor term, which has the dual advantage of combining the frequency dimension of the terms and the importance attached to them by the subjects. In the initial section of the research instrument, we asked each participant to list the first five nouns that meat to mind in response to the question 'cultivated meat' and to rank these nouns according to their perceived importance. We supplemented the free association task with five open-ended questions to increase the clarity and relevance of the data and reduce any potential lexical ambiguity. These questions encouraged participants to explain their word choices in writing. The answers provided valuable insights into the meanings and interpretations of each word, including the rationale behind the participants' choices. Synthetically, our research materials consisted, for each sub-sample of participants, of a corpus of free-associated words, a corpus of open-ended responses for each associated term chain, and a corpus of information from all other items related to descriptive variables and knowledge of cultivated meat. The next three sections of the questionnaire focus on identifying the content of the representation. In the second section, participants were asked to answer semi-structured and structured questions based on the following dimensions: prior knowledge of the item, information sources, and individual opinions about it. The third section examined the attitudinal component of the social representation studied, using both an instrument validated by [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] in 2004 [38] and a custom instrument inspired by the one validated by [PERSON] et al. in 2020 [39; 40]. The first scale, the Social Representation of New Foods Questionnaire (SR_NFQ) [38], consists of 27 statements addressing various aspects related to novel foods through five dimensions: suspicion of novelty, adherence to technology, preference for natural foods, eating as pleasure, and eating as necessity. Participants rated each item on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from'strongly disagree' to'strongly agree'. The second scale, the Cultured Meat Attitude Questionnaire (CuMAQ), comprises ten statements focusing on specific aspects of neophagy based on three dimensions: disgust (CuMAQ-D), interest (CuMAQ-I), and animal feeding (CuMAQ-F). Likewise, the items of this scale were rated on a 7-point Likert scale from'strongly disagree' to'strongly agree'. As part of the study, two further scales specifically designed to measure the participants' intention to eat cultured meat (CuM_EI-G) in general and their willingness to eat meat cultured from specific animals (cow, fish, chicken, and pork) (CuM_EI-S) were administered. At the end of these batteries, a special item directly measures the respondents' willingness to buy cultured meat (WtB). The answers were collected using a 7-point scale ranging from'strongly unlikely' to'strongly likely'. The fourth section of the research instrument focused on what we call Projective Sensory Experience (PSE). The study of food consumption behavior is moving from quantitative methods, like numerical questionnaires, to qualitative techniques that uncover deeper influences, such as open-ended questions and projective methods [41]. Projective methods, which use ambiguous stimuli like words or images, can provide personal insights.