Animals Like Us: Leveraging the Negativity Bias in Anthropomorphism to Reduce Beef Consumption.

Ziad Choueiki,Iris Vermeir,Maggie Geuens

doi:10.3390/foods10092147

Abstract

Our current work contributes to the literature of meat consumption reduction. Capitalizing on the inherent humanizing characteristic of anthropomorphism coupled with leveraging negativity bias, we created a novel approach to reduce meat-eating intention. Using on-pack product stickers, we compare an anthropomorphic message stressing the capacity to experience pain with two other anthropomorphic messages that have been used before in the literature (intelligence and pro-social behavior of animals). We find that an on-pack pain anthropomorphic sticker reduces purchase intentions of the meat product and intention to consume meat in general and is more effective than stickers displaying pro-social or intelligence messages. We also show that the pain message’s negative impact on purchase intention is serially mediated by anticipatory guilt and attitude towards meat. In addition, we show that the differential effectiveness of the anthropomorphic messages can be explained by the negativity bias. That is, when the pro-social and intelligence messages were formulated in a negative way (as is pain), all three messages were equally effective at reducing intention to purchase meat and increase intention to reduce meat consumption.

Highlights

For the majority of history, the place of meat in humans’ diet has remained one of an honored and celebrated food item for both its perceived health benefits and its influence on societies’ cultural, pro-social and economic development [1]
We checked whether respondents who were exposed to a specific sticker rate cows higher on the respective anthropomorphic trait than respondents exposed to another sticker
The current research establishes that the usage of anthropomorphism via on-pack stickers can lead to decreased purchase intentions of beef-burger patties along with an intention to decrease meat consumption in general

Summary

Introduction

For the majority of history, the place of meat in humans’ diet has remained one of an honored and celebrated food item for both its perceived health benefits and its influence on societies’ cultural, pro-social and economic development [1] Not surprisingly this has led us to consider eating meat as natural, normal, necessary, and nice [2]. It is only recently that meat came under intense scrutiny which increasingly highlighted the detrimental impact of meat production and consumption on animal welfare, human health and the environment [3,4,5,6,7,8,9] Despite this scientific evidence, meat demand is expected to further increase in the coming years [10,11,12,13], putting intense strain on our already exhausted ecosystems. In the context of meat consumption, several researchers [16,17] have already documented that consumers either employ prevention mechanisms aimed at blocking this state of dissonance from arising or use perceptual strategies to reduce the dissonance and reinforce the strong held beliefs regarding their meat eating habits

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion