Neurofunctional correlates of ethical, food-related decision-making.

J Bradley C Cherry,Amanda S Bruce,Jayson L Lusk,Jared M Bruce,John M Crespi,Seung-Lark Lim

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120541

Abstract

For consumers today, the perceived ethicality of a food’s production method can be as important a purchasing consideration as its price. Still, few studies have examined how, neurofunctionally, consumers are making ethical, food-related decisions. We examined how consumers’ ethical concern about a food’s production method may relate to how, neurofunctionally, they make decisions whether to purchase that food. Forty-six participants completed a measure of the extent to which they took ethical concern into consideration when making food-related decisions. They then underwent a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while performing a food-related decision-making (FRDM) task. During this task, they made 56 decisions whether to purchase a food based on either its price (i.e., high or low, the “price condition”) or production method (i.e., with or without the use of cages, the “production method condition”), but not both. For 23 randomly selected participants, we performed an exploratory, whole-brain correlation between ethical concern and differential neurofunctional activity in the price and production method conditions. Ethical concern correlated negatively and significantly with differential neurofunctional activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). For the remaining 23 participants, we performed a confirmatory, region-of-interest (ROI) correlation between the same variables, using an 8-mm3 volume situated in the left dlPFC. Again, the variables correlated negatively and significantly. This suggests, when making ethical, food-related decisions, the more consumers take ethical concern into consideration, the less they may rely on neurofunctional activity in the left dlPFC, possibly because making these decisions is more routine for them, and therefore a more perfunctory process requiring fewer cognitive resources.

Highlights

The foods we eat are changing, and with them, how we make decisions about those foods [1,2]
We hypothesized participants’ scores on the Ethical Concern subscale of the Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) would correlate positively and significantly with their differential neurofunctional activity, in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), when making decisions whether to purchase eggs based on their production method, as opposed to their price
Because only one regions of interest (ROIs) was identified, in the left dlPFC, that ROI served as the location for a subsequent, confirmatory, ROI correlation using behavioral and neurofunctional data from participants in Group B

Summary

Introduction

The foods we eat are changing, and with them, how we make decisions about those foods [1,2]. We examined how participants’ scores on the Ethical Concern subscale of the Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) [70] related to their differential neurofunctional activity when making binary, incentive-compatible, non-hypothetical decisions whether to purchase eggs differing in either their price (i.e., high or low) or production method (i.e., with or without the use of cages), but not both. We hypothesized participants’ scores on the Ethical Concern subscale of the FCQ would correlate positively and significantly with their differential neurofunctional activity, in the dlPFC and vmPFC, when making decisions whether to purchase eggs based on their production method, as opposed to their price

Materials and Methods

Participants

Results

Discussion