Predicting meat consumption from concurrent, automatic appraisals: Introducing nuance to product appraisals.

Area of Science:

• Consumer Psychology
• Behavioral Economics
• Food Science

Background:

• Traditional research on product appraisals and consumer behavior often uses generic evaluations, which are insufficient for complex choices like meat vs. plant-based diets.
• Conflicting dimensions such as taste, health, ethics, and sustainability influence dietary preferences, necessitating a more nuanced measurement approach.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the limitations of generic product appraisal measures by developing and validating a novel tool for simultaneous assessment of multiple automatic appraisal dimensions.
• To investigate the distinct contributions of automatic appraisals (health, taste, price, sustainability, ethicality) of meat and vegetarian stimuli to consumer behavior.

Main Methods:

• Development and application of a novel tool to measure automatic appraisals across multiple dimensions (health, taste, price, sustainability, ethicality) for meat and vegetarian stimuli.
• Comparison of automatic and explicit appraisal measures against various outcome variables, including purchase likelihood, meat consumption reduction, willingness to pay, meat consumption frequency, and Body Mass Index (BMI).

Main Results:

• Automatic appraisals were found to represent unique constructs and demonstrated varying degrees of influence on consumer behavior.
• Significant differences were observed between automatic and explicit appraisal measures in predicting outcome variables.
• Individual automatic appraisals showed unique predictive power for consumer behavior related to meat and plant-based food choices.

Conclusions:

• The novel tool effectively captures distinct automatic appraisals, offering a more comprehensive understanding of consumer decision-making in food choices.
• Findings highlight the importance of considering multi-dimensional automatic appraisals to improve behavioral models and inform interventions aimed at dietary shifts.
• Future research should leverage multi-dimensional automatic appraisal measures to better understand and predict consumer behavior in the context of sustainable and healthy eating.