Implicit attitudes toward wildlife products

Abstract

Wildlife conservation is a key issue for the sustainable development of nature. Understanding consumers’ true attitudes toward wildlife products would contribute to the promotion of wildlife conservation. Yet, the inner thoughts of consumers toward wildlife products are difficult to acquire, particularly under the circumstance that some wildlife trades are illegal. Most available researches have used self-report questionnaires to measure consumers’ explicit attitudes that are usually biased by social desirability. Different from previous approach, the current study tend to use implicit association test, a well-accepted measurement, to detect implicit attitudes that are impacted by automatically activated evaluation without performers’ awareness. Our results indicated that participants may explicitly expressed negative attitudes towards wildlife products, but implicitly be in favor of them. Besides, participants hold stronger negative attitudes towards the consumption of hedonic wildlife products than utilitarian wildlife products. The inconsistency in attitudes we identified shows the importance of introducing implicit approaches to avoid evasive responses, and to accurately understand participants’ attitudes toward wildlife products. It is a convincing preliminary experimental evidence for designing effective interventions.