Are Character Strengths and Attitudes towards Vegetarian Food Related?

Abstract

One aspect of sustainable consumption behavior is the shift to a vegetarian diet. This study investigates if individual factors, like character strengths, are related to attitudes toward vegetarian food. Additionally, the study examines potential variations in character strengths between vegetarians/vegans and omnivores, as well as whether there are differences in explicit and implicit affective attitudes towards vegetarian and meat-based diets. A total of 210 participants filled out a demographic questionnaire, a scale measuring character strength, an explicit rating task, and an affective priming task that involved images of both vegetarian and meat-based food. The results showed that there was no difference in the explicit and implicit rating of meat-based food compared to vegetarian food for omnivore people. Vegetarians/vegans rated vegetarian food explicitly and implicitly more positively than meat-based food. Only the four character strengths of prudence, appreciation of beauty and excellence, humor, and teamwork, besides the diet type (vegetarians/vegans vs. omnivores), predicted the explicit attitudes toward vegetarian food. Vegetarians/vegans and omnivores only differed in the character strengths of love of learning and forgiveness. This study provides evidence that the explicit and implicit attitudes towards vegetarian food are concordant for vegetarians and vegans with their diet choice. Furthermore, the relationship between character strengths and explicit attitudes toward vegetarian food is weak, which hints that those individual transformative qualities (Woiwode et al., 2021) toward sustainable attitude and behavior should be investigated carefully and in-depth.