Wenn Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten die Umweltverträglichkeit von Lebensmitteln beurteilen – Ergebnisse experimenteller Studien Wenn Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten die Umweltverträglichkeit von Lebensmitteln beurteilen – Ergebnisse experimenteller Studien

Abstract

Consumers can make a contribution to sustainable development by showing a demand for green products. Ideally, for choosing a product, a consumer would pay attention to the product's values on all environmentally relevant dimensions, which include: agricultural practice, transport distances, packaging, and conservation practices. How do people deal with such a challenge? The experiments reported in this paper explore the environmental evaluations of food products that people make when presented with information about environmentally significant dimensions. The results show that environmental judgments are affected by the way in which a particular product is presented, i.e., whether a given product is presented and evaluated separately (separate evaluation mode) or whether it is presented within a set of other product alternatives and evaluated side by side (joint evaluation mode). Because consumers are highly susceptible to influences of context, they may sometimes arrive at erroneous conclusions about which products are environmentally friendly and which are not. As a consequence, despite their intentions to buy environmentally-friendly products, consumers may, in the end, purchase products that are not environmentally friendly.