Exploring explicit and implicit attitudes towards wildlife food

Abstract

Illegitimate wildlife consumption poses threats to public health, biodiversity and natural ecosystems. Understanding of public attitudes towards wildlife as food can help promote wildlife conservation. However, almost wildlife consumption researches limit insights to subjective attitudes. To address this gap, the present employs a comprehensive approach, combining questionnaires, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) paradigm, and Event-Related Potential (ERP) method. This multi-method strategy enables better exploration of both explicit and implicit attitudes toward wildlife food. Participants who had been exposed to wildlife food consumption were randomly recruited. Compared to non-wildlife foods, people had a lower acceptability of wildlife foods, a longer reaction time when paired with positive words and a smaller N400 component when paired with negative words. These results revealed that public showed negative attitudes towards wildlife food compared to non-wildlife food, and this result was consistent between explicit and implicit attitudes. This outcome also provides a positive signal for wildlife conservation. Leveraging the public's negative perceptions of wildlife food in conjunction with the adverse consequences of eating wildlife food can be employed to further the cause of wildlife conservation.